Daejeon, July 27–31
Augustine of Hippo (354–430 CE) was a major thinker in Christian theology and Western philosophy. His works are linguistically complex and thematically diverse, encompassing numerous texts in Latin and various translations, which present significant challenges for contemporary scholarship (Brown 1967). Existing digital projects on Augustine, such as the CAG-online (augustinus.de n.d.) and the St. Augustine Memory Project (2014), mainly provide text access functions but lack semantic understanding and cross-linguistic interaction capabilities.
The project introduced in this paper, the AI Augustine Knowledge Base, aims to overcome these limitations through the integration of large language models and knowledge graph construction, enabling intelligent and semantic access to Augustine’s writings. It conceptualizes artificial intelligence as a “machine of memory,” exploring its potential to reconstruct theological and philosophical memory within the context of the digital humanities.
The integration of artificial intelligence with intelligent augmentation technologies offers new possibilities for transforming digital archives from traditional static repositories into dynamic, interactive environments. In this context, AI-driven systems can enhance user engagement and promote reflective learning and knowledge generation, reshaping archives into highly participatory and continuously evolving spaces of cultural memory (Fleischmann / Strauss 2025).
The augustinus.it project provides a relatively comprehensive bilingual edition of Augustine’s works in Latin and Italian, laying a valuable foundation for related research (augustinus.it n.d.). However, its content remains limited to text access and basic indexing, making it difficult to explore Augustine’s theological and philosophical structures through interactive and dynamic approaches.
Our project builds directly on the digital corpus provided by augustinus.it and seeks to address these limitations: recent advances in large language models and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enable context-aware retrieval, concept-level mapping, and historically informed interpretation, opening new possibilities for constructing a semantically rich, AI-supported knowledge base of Augustine (Sharma et al. 2025).
The dataset for this project is based on the online database augustinus.it (augustinus.it n.d.), which encompasses the complete works of Augustine in the original Latin as well as Italian translations. This database was selected due to the completeness of its texts, the reliability of its editorial structure, and its accessibility as a stable digital corpus. The Latin originals were further cross-checked against the Corpus Augustinianum Gissense to ensure academic rigor and textual consistency with established critical editions. Italian translations were included because they form a stable and systematically aligned digital corpus corresponding closely to the Latin originals, making them suitable for computational comparison.
In addition, several Chinese secondary sources were selected as reference annotations, including Xia Dongqi’s The Authority of the World: Augustine’s Social and Political Thought (2007), Zhou Weichi’s Augustine’s Christian Thought (2005), and Memory and Illumination: A Study of Augustine’s Philosophical Theology (2001). These Chinese scholarly works are included to introduce localized academic perspectives into the interpretation of Augustine’s writings. The selected studies by Xia Dongqi and Zhou Weichi represent three major interpretive approaches in Augustine studies: political thought, philosophical theology, and systematic theology. They are also widely cited in contemporary Chinese Augustine scholarship. Together, they provide a representative reference framework for situating Chinese interpretations of Augustine within the broader historiography of Augustine studies.
Together, these texts form a multilingual corpus integrated via paragraph-level alignment and metadata normalization. Latin-Italian passages are paired by shared structural identifiers, while Chinese secondary scholarship is linked as paragraph-level annotations using the same reference keys and normalized concept and entity tags, yielding a single queryable model for cross-lingual tracing. All texts are then subjected to standard preprocessing, including basic cleaning, segmentation, tokenization, and entity tagging, to ensure structural consistency for downstream computational analysis and model training.
During the model training phase, we selected LLaMA as the foundational open multilingual model and fine-tuned it using the Augustine corpus. LLaMA provides strong cross-linguistic capabilities across Latin, English, and Chinese, supporting multilingual semantic alignment. Fine-tuning is necessary because Augustine’s texts display distinctive rhetorical structures, theological terminology, and features of Late Latin that differ from modern corpora. Training on the Augustine corpus therefore enables the model to better capture the semantic and historical characteristics of Augustine’s writings.
Based on the trained model, the project develops two primary research components. The first is a structured Augustine knowledge base and intelligent question-answering system. The knowledge base organizes key concepts, theological arguments, philosophical themes, and textual references extracted from Augustine’s works, while the question-answering interface allows users to query the corpus in natural language. To evaluate the system’s effectiveness, the project plans to conduct qualitative expert review and task-based evaluation with researchers in Augustine studies, assessing the accuracy, interpretive reliability, and usability of the generated responses.
The second component is an experimental “Digital Augustine” dialogue interface that explores new forms of public engagement with historical texts. A virtual representation of Augustine, informed by historically attested iconography, is integrated with the trained language model to enable text and voice interaction. The use of 3D visualization and optional VR access is primarily intended as an interface design experiment rather than as a claim about pedagogical effectiveness, and further empirical evaluation will be required to assess its educational impact.
Because the system simulates a historical figure, the project also follows ethical best practices for the digital representation of historical personae. The interface clearly indicates that responses are generated by an AI model trained on Augustine’s writings rather than representing Augustine himself, and the system prioritizes transparent citation of relevant textual sources whenever possible.
Finally, the project follows open science principles where feasible: the corpus construction methodology, metadata schema, and evaluation procedures will be documented and made publicly accessible to support reproducibility and future research in digital Augustinian studies.
This monograph examines Augustine’s understanding of authority within the social and political order of late antiquity. Drawing on Augustine’s Latin writings and engaging with modern scholarship, Xia analyzes the formation of Augustine’s concept of authority across several domains, including the transformation of authority in human society, the role of history and the “two cities”, the structure of family and marriage, the nature and function of the state, and the relationship between church and empire. Through these discussions, the book situates Augustine’s political and social thought within the broader historical context of the late Roman world and Christian intellectual tradition.
This monograph examines Augustine’s philosophical theology with particular attention to the doctrines of memory and divine illumination. Through a close reading of Augustine’s major works, Zhou analyzes Augustine’s theory of knowledge, the structure of human memory, and the relationship between human cognition and divine truth. The study situates these concepts within the broader framework of Augustine’s philosophical reflections on the soul, truth, and the process of knowing, highlighting the interaction between classical philosophical traditions and Christian theological thought.
This monograph provides a systematic study of Augustine’s Christian theology. Through an analysis of Augustine’s major writings, Zhou examines central theological themes such as grace, original sin, the nature of the will, and the relationship between human freedom and divine salvation. The book also discusses Augustine’s influence on the development of Western Christian thought, situating his theology within the broader intellectual context of late antiquity and the patristic tradition.