[HN Gopher] Reading Akkadian cuneiform using natural language pr...
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Reading Akkadian cuneiform using natural language processing (2020)
Author : Bluestein
Score : 16 points
Date : 2024-08-12 22:52 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (journals.plos.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (journals.plos.org)
| gumby wrote:
| Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41229597
| Bluestein wrote:
| Find this application exciting. Using natural language processing
| to crack Akkadian cuneiform is like equipping a historian with a
| high-speed translation engine. What once took scholars
| painstaking years of decoding complex logograms and syntax now
| gets a digital boost, with NLP stepping in and saying, "Let's
| breeze through these ancient texts like it's a weekend crossword
| puzzle."
| sungam wrote:
| I'm sure that all of the ancient scripts will be fed into an LLM
| or equivalent eventually - it will be fascinating to see if this
| will give new insights into the evolution of language and culture
| - perhaps even allowing understanding of undeciphered scripts
| such as Linear A
| Bluestein wrote:
| Understanding Linear A would be revolutionary.-
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| It would certainly be newsworthy, but I'm not sure about
| revolutionary. We only have essentially a few pages worth of
| linear A, and who knows what's written with it.
|
| Undoubtedly there are tablets and scripts that have been
| sitting unread in an archive somewhere, in a deciphered
| language, that we just haven't gotten around to analyzing
| yet.
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