@inproceedings{otten-anastasopoulos-2025-towards,
    title = "Towards {A}ncient {M}eroitic Decipherment: A Computational Approach",
    author = "Otten, Joshua  and
      Anastasopoulos, Antonios",
    editor = "Anderson, Adam  and
      Gordin, Shai  and
      Li, Bin  and
      Liu, Yudong  and
      Passarotti, Marco C.  and
      Sprugnoli, Rachele",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Ancient Language Processing",
    month = may,
    year = "2025",
    address = "The Albuquerque Convention Center, Laguna",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/author-page-jing-li-nut/2025.alp-1.11/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2025.alp-1.11",
    pages = "87--98",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-235-0",
    abstract = "The discovery of the Rosetta Stone was one of the keys that helped unlock the secrets of Ancient Egypt and its hieroglyphic lan-guage. But what about languages with no such ``Rosetta Stone?'' Meroitic is an ancient lan-guage from what is now present-day Sudan, but even though it is connected to Egyptian in many ways, much of its grammar and vocabu-lary remains undeciphered. In this work, we in-troduce the challenge of Meroitic decipherment as a computational task, and present the first Meroitic machine-readable corpus. We then train embeddings and perform intrinsic evalu-ations, as well as cross-lingual alignment ex-periments between Meroitic and Late-Egyptian. We conclude by outlining open problems and potential research directions."
}