Ancient Language Processing: Teaching Computers to Read Cuneiform Tablets
upstart writes in with an IRC submission for AnonymousCoward:
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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