When text authors lived using undated citations

Abstract

In this research, we identify the era in which the author of the given document(s) lived. For rabbinic documents written in Hebrew-Aramaic, which are usually undated and do not contain any bibliographic section, this problem is important. The aim of this research is to find in which years an author was born and died, based on his documents and the documents of dated authors who refer to the author under discussion or are mentioned by him. Such estimates can help determine the time era in which specific documents were written and in some cases identify an anonymous author. We have formulated various types of "iron-clad", heuristic and greedy constraints defining the birth and death years. Experiments applied on corpora containing texts authored by 12 and 24 rabbinic authors show reasonable results.