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Restoring ancient text using deep learning: a case study on Greek epigraphy (arxiv.org)
69 points by breck on Oct 19, 2019 | hide | past | pdf | 4 comments on HN

In plain words: A deep-learning system fills in missing letters of damaged ancient Greek inscriptions by reading the surrounding text for context. Trained on the largest digital collection of such texts, it guessed wrong on 30.1% of characters, versus 57.3% for human experts.

Abstract

Ancient history relies on disciplines such as epigraphy, the study of ancient inscribed texts, for evidence of the recorded past. However, these texts, "inscriptions", are often damaged over the centuries, and illegible parts of the text must be restored by specialists, known as epigraphists. This work presents Pythia, the first ancient text restoration model that recovers missing characters from a damaged text input using deep neural networks. Its architecture is carefully designed to handle long-term context information, and deal efficiently with missing or corrupted character and word representations. To train it, we wrote a non-trivial pipeline to convert PHI, the largest digital corpus of ancient Greek inscriptions, to machine actionable text, which we call PHI-ML. On PHI-ML, Pythia's predictions achieve a 30.1% character error rate, compared to the 57.3% of human epigraphists. Moreover, in 73.5% of cases the ground-truth sequence was among the Top-20 hypotheses of Pythia, which effectively demonstrates the impact of this assistive method on the field of digital epigraphy, and sets the state-of-the-art in ancient text restoration.

Yannis Assael, Thea Sommerschield, Jonathan Prag
arXiv:1910.06262 · cs.CL, cs.CY · submitted Oct 14, 2019
abstract · pdf · html

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There is something badly wrong with this paper. Their example shows them restoring μηδέν ἄγαν from μηδέν ἄ??ν. The diacritics are human provided, and very much limit the search space. The inscription to start with would actually be μηδενα??ν (that is, if the number of characters between α and ν is correct, which is also a human provided guess.

All of their other examples seem to start with diacritics as well. What a mistake!

Reminds me of the algorithm from a Canticle for Leibowitz one of the monks was working on. I do have to wonder if things like this do more harm than good. A guess done by deep learning is still just a guess, the difference being the additional danger of it looking more authoritive and certain than it is.
It seems like this particular alogrithm has two main components that are highly important, and human-oriented:

a) The search space is limited with human-supplied options.

b) The output isn't deterministic, is offers a series of best guesses.

I would say this is closer to a NN-powered spellchecker than an authoritative source on the restoration of the work. It still requires a decent amount of interaction from an actual expert for the system to work.

I'm not a DL or ancient greek expert but it seems their NN outputs top20 predictions, so it's more an assistant suggesting characters/words than an authoritative thing. If it helps academicians restoring ancient texts in a way that is faster and with less errors, where is the harm?