Kate Kelley


2019

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Sign Clustering and Topic Extraction in Proto-Elamite
Logan Born | Kate Kelley | Nishant Kambhatla | Carolyn Chen | Anoop Sarkar
Proceedings of the 3rd Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature

We describe a first attempt at using techniques from computational linguistics to analyze the undeciphered proto-Elamite script. Using hierarchical clustering, n-gram frequencies, and LDA topic models, we both replicate results obtained by manual decipherment and reveal previously-unobserved relationships between signs. This demonstrates the utility of these techniques as an aid to manual decipherment.