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posted by Fnord666 on Sunday March 15 2020, @03:13PM   Printer-friendly
from the it's-a-shopping-list dept.

Ancient Language Processing: Teaching Computers to Read Cuneiform Tablets:

Twenty-five centuries ago, the "paperwork" of Persia's Achaemenid Empire was recorded on clay tablets—tens of thousands of which were discovered in 1933 in modern-day Iran by archaeologists from the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute [(OI)]. For decades, researchers painstakingly studied and translated these ancient documents by hand, but this manual deciphering process is very difficult, slow and prone to errors.

[...]Since the 1990s, scientists have recruited computers to help—with limited success, due to the three-dimensional nature of the tablets and the complexity of the cuneiform characters. But a technological breakthrough at the University of Chicago may finally make automated transcription of these tablets—which reveal rich information about Achaemenid history, society and language—possible, freeing up archaeologists for higher-level analysis.

That's the motivation behind DeepScribe, a collaboration between researchers from the OI and UChicago's Department of Computer Science. With a training set of more than 6,000 annotated images from the Persepolis Fortification Archive, (directed by professor emeritus Matthew W. Stolper), the project will build a model that can "read" as-yet-unanalyzed tablets in the collection, and potentially [create] a tool that archaeologists can adapt to other studies of ancient writing.

"If we could come up with a tool that is flexible and extensible, that can spread to different scripts and time periods, that would really be field-changing," said Susanne Paulus, associate professor of Assyriology.


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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday March 17 2020, @03:39AM (1 child)

    by bzipitidoo (4388) on Tuesday March 17 2020, @03:39AM (#972090) Journal

    Yep! Unicode will have every widely used written language, ever. Egyptian Hieroglyphs, Minoan Linear A and B, Mayan, Indus Valley .... We don't know how to read Linear A, but it's in there. Mayan and Indus Valley script are not yet in Unicode, but they will be.

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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday March 17 2020, @03:48AM

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Tuesday March 17 2020, @03:48AM (#972093) Journal

    I was wondering if there were any undeciphered scripts included in Unicode. Thanks!

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