@inproceedings{driggers-ellis-etal-2026-formal,
    title = "Formal Machine Interpretation for the Semasiographic {M}ixtec Codices of Precolonial and Early Colonial Mesoamerica",
    author = "Driggers-Ellis, Christopher  and
      Ayoubi, Gabriel  and
      Girish.Salunke811@Gmail.Com, Girish.Salunke811@Gmail.Com  and
      Grant, Christan",
    editor = "Yan, Qianqi  and
      Montariol, Syrielle  and
      Fan, Yue  and
      Gu, Jing  and
      Pan, Jiayi  and
      Li, Manling  and
      Kordjamshidi, Parisa  and
      Suhr, Alane  and
      Wang, Xin Eric",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Advances in Language and Vision Research ({ALVR})",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, USA",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-workshops/2026.alvr-main.20/",
    pages = "230--238",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-398-2",
    abstract = "The precolonial and early colonial Mixtec codices describe the history and stories of the region in a semasiographic medium that is full of symbolic representations and meant to be narrated.Recently, the community has introduced datasets of XML representations of related media, including Aztec codices and Mayan hieroglyphic script, in a step towards symbolic machine interpretation of these historic Mesoamerican artifacts.In this work, we propose formal symbolic machine interpretation of XML encodings representing facsimile images from the Mixtec Codex Zouche-Nuttal.We demonstrate the efficacy of symbolic machine interpretation from XML step-by-step, showing how our parser and interpreter process text capturing a scene from the Mixtec Codex Zouche-Nuttall.We hope our contribution and the example we provide motivate collaboration among the archaeological, historical, linguistic, and natural language processing research communities to apply machine interpretation to Mixtec codices and similar manuscripts."
}