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Restoration of Fragmentary Babylonian Texts Using Recurrent Neural Networks (arxiv.org)
2 points by wslh on Nov 5, 2020 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Broken clay tablets from ancient Babylonia are missing chunks of text that experts now fill in by hand. A neural network trained on Akkadian writing is tested to see if it can suggest those missing words and help or replace that manual work.

Abstract

The main source of information regarding ancient Mesopotamian history and culture are clay cuneiform tablets. Despite being an invaluable resource, many tablets are fragmented leading to missing information. Currently these missing parts are manually completed by experts. In this work we investigate the possibility of assisting scholars and even automatically completing the breaks in ancient Akkadian texts from Achaemenid period Babylonia by modelling the language using recurrent neural networks.

Ethan Fetaya, Yonatan Lifshitz, Elad Aaron, Shai Gordin
arXiv:2003.01912 · cs.CL, cs.LG, stat.ML · submitted Mar 4, 2020
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