Cuneiform writing was invented in the ancient Near East. It had many variations and was used to write many languages, such as Sumerian, Akkadian, Hittite, and Old Persian. It has a complex structure, because the same letters can represent both specific words and carry a phonetic or grammatical value.
For example, one of the letters in the Akkadian language (“ud”) originally meant the sun, but it also appears in 17 phonetic functions and six context-dependent meaningful functions. So, even the transliteration of cuneiform into the Latin alphabet presupposes interpretation.
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Hundreds of thousands of clay tablets have survived to our time, some of which are approximately 5.5 thousand years old. years. BGiven how few experts know these languages, this amount of text cannot be translated using traditional methods.
A team led by Shai Jordin of Ariel University in Israel has developed a program that can translate from Akkadian to English. The researchers used an AI that they trained in pairs. One form translates Akkadian from cuneiform, while the other uses Latin script.
The transliterated version works better. It does happen that the program creates meaningless sentences (the authors use the term “hallucinations”) – consistent with English syntax, but not reflecting meaning in Akkadian. However, in most cases, the program will create a useful version as a starting point.
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In the article, the authors write about the difficulties associated with translation from languages such as Akkadian. In addition to the ambiguity of characters or the absence of punctuation marks, there is the problem of damage to many panels. Therefore, there is a problem with context reconstruction.
According to the authors, the program can do its job by providing raw text, which will then be edited by humans.
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