Abstract
A numeration system encodes abstract numeric quantities as concrete strings of written characters. The numeration systems used by modern scripts tend to be precise and unambiguous, but this was not so for the ancient and partially-deciphered proto-Elamite (PE) script, where written numerals can have up to four distinct readings depending on the system that is used to read them. We consider the task of disambiguating between these readings in order to determine the values of the numeric quantities recorded in this corpus. We algorithmically extract a list of possible readings for each PE numeral notation, and contribute two disambiguation techniques based on structural properties of the original documents and classifiers learned with the bootstrapping algorithm. We also contribute a test set for evaluating disambiguation techniques, as well as a novel approach to cautious rule selection for bootstrapped classifiers. Our analysis confirms existing intuitions about this script and reveals previously-unknown correlations between tablet content and numeral magnitude. This work is crucial to understanding and deciphering PE, as the corpus is heavily accounting-focused and contains many more numeric tokens than tokens of text.- Anthology ID:
- 2023.cawl-1.9
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the Workshop on Computation and Written Language (CAWL 2023)
- Month:
- July
- Year:
- 2023
- Address:
- Toronto, Canada
- Editors:
- Kyle Gorman, Richard Sproat, Brian Roark
- Venue:
- CAWL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 71–81
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2023.cawl-1.9
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2023.cawl-1.9
- Cite (ACL):
- Logan Born, M. Willis Monroe, Kathryn Kelley, and Anoop Sarkar. 2023. Disambiguating Numeral Sequences to Decipher Ancient Accounting Corpora. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Computation and Written Language (CAWL 2023), pages 71–81, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Disambiguating Numeral Sequences to Decipher Ancient Accounting Corpora (Born et al., CAWL 2023)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/dois-2013-emnlp/2023.cawl-1.9.pdf