Key-Phrases as Means to Estimate Birth and Death Years of Jewish Text Authors.

In this study, we try to determine the time-frame in which the author of a given document lived. The discussed documents are rabbinic documents written in the Hebrew, Aramaic and Yiddish languages. The documents are usually undated and do not contain a bibliographic section, which leaves us with an interesting challenge to determine the desired time-frame. To do this, we define a set of key-phrases and formulate various types of rules: \"Iron-clad\", Heuristic and Greedy constraints, to define the time-frame. These rules are based on key-phrases and key-words in the documents of the authors. Identifying the time-frame of an author can help us determine the generation in which specific documents were written, can help in the examination of documents, i.e., to conclude if documents were edited, and can also help us identify an anonymous author. We tested these rules on two corpuses of documents, which were authored by 12 and 24 rabbinic authors, respectively, and the results are promising.