Restoring ancient text using deep learning: a case study on Greek epigraphy

Yannis Assael, Thea Sommerschield, Jonathan Prag


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.
Anthology ID:
D19-1668
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2019
Address:
Hong Kong, China
Editors:
Kentaro Inui, Jing Jiang, Vincent Ng, Xiaojun Wan
Venues:
EMNLP | IJCNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6368–6375
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1668
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D19-1668
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yannis Assael, Thea Sommerschield, and Jonathan Prag. 2019. Restoring ancient text using deep learning: a case study on Greek epigraphy. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP), pages 6368–6375, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Restoring ancient text using deep learning: a case study on Greek epigraphy (Assael et al., EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1668.pdf
Attachment:
 D19-1668.Attachment.zip
Code
 sommerschield/ancient-text-restoration