In Adana, southern Türkiye, known for its cultural richness and history, the country’s most comprehensive digital proverbs dictionary containing over 18,000 proverbs has been created using artificial intelligence.
With a target to increase the number of proverbs to 30,000 within a year, project leader professor Engin Çetin, a faculty member at Çukurova University's (ÇÜ) Department of Turkish Language and Literature, said, "Readers will be able to find all proverbs recorded from our earliest texts, such as the Orkhon Inscriptions, up to the early 20th century. Our project is also a historical study encompassing a 1,200-year period."
Çetin initiated the "Turkish Proverbs Project from Central Asia to Anatolia" two years ago. As part of the project, proverbs were compiled from the oldest Turkish texts discovered in Central Asia to those written in modern times. These thousands of proverbs were categorized and turned into a comprehensive dictionary featuring example sentences. Utilizing artificial intelligence, the proverbs were digitized and made available to the public on the official Çukurova University website.
Designed to be user-friendly with definitions, historical contexts, and example sentences, this collection is valuable for students completing assignments, teachers assigning work, and researchers conducting comparative and historical studies.
Highlighting that the project has produced the most comprehensive dictionary ever created for Turkish, professor Engin Çetin explained, "The most extensive proverbs dictionaries prepared for Turkish until now include around 10,000 proverbs. But our project currently contains over 18,000 proverbs, and we still have a year to work on it."
"We expect this number to reach nearly 30,000; while we call this the most comprehensive project for Turkish, we can confidently say it’s also the most extensive project in world languages. In our research, we couldn’t find any other work on proverbs in any language worldwide that is as extensive as this one," he added.
Explaining the role of artificial intelligence in the project, professor Çetin said, "We developed software to digitize thousands of proverbs, which operates under a domain linked to Çukurova University; developing this software took a few months, we have been inputting all the proverbs identified since the era of Central Asia into this software."
"Our researchers and staff input the proverbs one by one, categorizing them by meaning and assigning keywords, readers can not only find the specific proverb they’re searching for but also see a list of similar proverbs, their definitions, historical contexts, and whether the meaning is positive or negative," he said.
Reflecting on the inspiration behind the project, Çetin shared that it stemmed from his childhood, influenced by his parents’ frequent use of proverbs. "Our project began in 2022, and we will continue developing it for another year. Readers will be able to find proverbs recorded in our earliest texts, from the Orkhon Inscriptions to the early 20th century. Our project is a historical study covering a 1,200-year period," he added.
