Information retrieval and question answering for assisting readers of the late antique to medieval corpora of the aggadic midrash

One category of software for the cultural heritage is tools intended to enhance the fruition texts of a literary canon. This overlaps much of humanities computing. This paper is about a project, now in the design phase, of a software tool that would help readers to understand homiletical derivations as proposed in the texts of the rabbinic so-called Aggadic Midrash. Unlike in GALLURA — which given a name, has the task of playfully generating narrative explanations in the style of those texts, and by adopting their poetic conventions — in the present Midrashic Q/A project, the explanation is already given concisely in the input texts, and the tool has to make sense of the imaginative derivation proposed there, and supply the user with a plain and explicit explanation of what is meant. The more proficient the tool would be, the more sophisticated the architecture enabling that: information retrieval and ontologies are invoked, but the tool should recreate a narrative situational nugget that underlies the homiletical playful etymology that the midrashic text proposes for a name.