# Svarna: An Open Corpus Workbench for Modern Greek

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.00970 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.00970/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 9 of its 38 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02116/) (2019)
- [mT5: A massively multilingual pre-trained text-to-text transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11934/) (2020)
- [Findings of the BabyLM Challenge: Sample-Efficient Pretraining on Developmentally Plausible Corpora](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.08165/) (2025)
- [GREEK-BERT: The Greeks visiting Sesame Street](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.12014/) (2020)
- [NLP for The Greek Language: A Longer Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.10962/) (2024)
- [A Greek Parliament Proceedings Dataset for Computational Linguistics and Political Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.12883/) (2022)
- [GRDD: A Dataset for Greek Dialectal NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00802/) (2023)
- [GRDD+: An Extended Greek Dialectal Dataset with Cross-Architecture Fine-tuning Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.03772/) (2025)
- [OYXOY: A Modern NLP Test Suite for Modern Greek](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07009/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper introduces Svarna, a free, open-source, web-based corpus workbench for modern Greek. Svarna integrates five databases covering various registers, institutional, literary, dialectal, social media, and historical, to provide a total of more than 507 million words and around 29 million sentences. This platform addresses the chronic gaps in Greek language technology. Although various corpus resources exist, they are scattered across different platforms, and in many cases, institutional access is restricted or they are no longer available online. Svarna integrates these resources into a single interface that can be used without logging in, installation, or specialized training. This system provides a concordancer with KWIC marking capabilities, frequency analysis including register-by-register normalization, collocation extraction using mutual information, a dictionary of 93 Greek discourse markers providing distribution profiles, text-level analysis tools including n-grams, variants, and collocation networks, register comparison using log-ratio, regular expression search, and an optional LLM layer for pragmatic annotation and free research mode. This platform is built upon SQLite FTS5 full-text indexes provided via a FastAPI backend, deployed as Docker containers on Azure, and released under the MIT license. Source code, build scripts, and deployment configurations are publicly available on GitHub. Users can add their own corpora and deploy their own instances. This document describes the system design, corpus structure, and use cases demonstrating the various queries supported by the platform. Svarna serves as the first step in exploring available data and is expected to lay the foundation for more comprehensive research in the future.