pretty_name: Alignment conventions — attributed rules
tags:
- bible
- word-alignment
- provenance
license: cc-by-4.0
alignment-conventions — the rules our aligners were given, and where each rule came from
When an LLM checks a word alignment (the full-alignments-llm layers), it is given, besides the verse, a short conventions
text for the language: how the text is cut into positions, where English the / of / auxiliaries go, what a Hebrew prefix is,
and so on. This dataset publishes every such text exactly as it was sent, and the same text split into rules, each with a
derivation record, so you can tell a measured fact from a rule an LLM wrote.
Kinds of rule
| kind | what it means | derivation record | licence |
|---|---|---|---|
measured |
counted on a hand-made alignment: what a function word renders and how often | gold source, base text, books, method, script hashes, date, the counts (figures) |
the gold's (Clear-Bible/Alignments: CC BY 4.0) |
by-construction |
true because of how the data are built (e.g. the tokenizer) | the code that makes it true | CC0 |
llm-authored |
written by an LLM (Claude, Anthropic) in a lexeme-aligner working session | the file, its first and last commit, the evidence the text itself cites; for edition facts the markup it rests on (basis) |
CC0 |
An llm-authored rule carries a check: unchecked, and where measured rules exist about the same words, their ids
(related_measured). That is a pointer, not a verdict: whether the measured figures confirm the rule is left to the reader until a
recorded check says otherwise.
How much the wording matters (measured, 2026-10-26): on the BSB (Mark 1–3 against Clear's gold, Ruth against the morpheme-split gold), four different conventions texts — long, short, measured-only, and both — moved the checker's link F1 by less than 0.01 (chain alone .690 / .675, with the checker .775–.783 / .746–.759). Adding the measured default to each function-word question moved it by at most +0.003. Read these rules as a record of the choices behind the alignment more than as a lever on it.
Layout
<lang>/<name>/<sha8>/conventions.md the exact text sent to the aligner; <sha8> = first 8 hex of its sha256 (every version kept)
<lang>/<name>/<sha8>/rules.json {"license", "sha256", "rules": [...]} — the same text as rules
<lang>/measured/<profile>/rules.json measured rules, e.g. eng/measured/bsb-clear (BSB, Clear's manual alignment)
manifest.json every set: name, sha256, whether it is the current text, rule counts by kind
A rule:
{"id": "eng.measured.bsb-clear.OT.source.וְ", "kind": "measured",
"scope": {"language": "eng", "testament": "OT", "source": "וְ"},
"text": "וְ: no word of its own 57%; 'and' 33%",
"figures": {"n": 11286, "renderings": {"none": 6481, "and": 3717, "but": 322, "so": 226, "then": 146, "now": 109}},
"derivation": {"source": "Clear-Bible/Alignments (manual), base text BSB", "license": "CC-BY-4.0", "books": ["GEN", "1SA", "PSA", "ISA"],
"method": "...word-level links split into MACULA morphemes by lexeme_aligner.eval.gold_split...", "date": "2026-10-26"}}
Which layer used which text
Each layer of full-alignments-llm carries _conventions.json:
books maps every book to the <lang>/<name>/<sha8> it was aligned with (one edition can use several versions, e.g. the KJV used
three), and sets repeats those rule sets, so a layer is self-contained.
Measured rules for the Hebrew Old Testament
Clear's Hebrew alignment links whole words (source_unit: word): for בִּימֵי -> "in the days" it does not say that "in" is the prefix
ב's. Our source text splits prefixes and suffixes off, so the OT figures come from Clear's links split into morphemes by a stated
rule (lexeme_aligner.eval.gold_split): inside the gold span a prefix takes the leftmost word its fixed list or its MACULA gloss
allows, a suffix the rightmost, the stem keeps the rest; a part with no such word gets none. Every split link records how it was made.
Clear has no morpheme links to check this against; a hand check of 30 random words found the split right where the gold span itself
was.
Credits
Clear-Bible/Alignments and Clear-Bible MACULA Hebrew/Greek (CC BY 4.0); the conventions texts and the scripts are by the lexeme-aligner project (CC0), LLM-authored rules written with Claude (Anthropic).