@inproceedings{luo-etal-2026-enabling,
    title = "Enabling Stroke-Level Structural Analysis of Hieroglyphic Scripts without Language-Specific Priors",
    author = "Luo, Fuwen  and
      Wan, Zihao  and
      Wang, Ziyue  and
      Liu, Yaluo  and
      Xu, Pau Tong Lin  and
      Qiao, Xuanjia  and
      Wang, Xiaolong  and
      Li, Peng  and
      Liu, Yang",
    editor = "Liakata, Maria  and
      Moreira, Viviane P.  and
      Zhang, Jiajun  and
      Jurgens, David",
    booktitle = "Findings of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics: {ACL} 2026",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.findings-acl.1383/",
    pages = "27794--27810",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-395-1",
    abstract = "Hieroglyphs, as logographic writing systems, encode rich semantic and cultural information within their internal structural composition. Yet, current advanced Large Language Models (LLMs) and Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) usually remain structurally blind to this information. LLMs process characters as textual tokens, while MLLMs additionally view them as raw pixel grids. Both fall short to model the underlying logic of character strokes. Furthermore, existing structural analysis methods are often script-specific and labor-intensive. In this paper, we propose Hieroglyphic Stroke Analyzer (HieroSA), a novel and generalizable framework that enables MLLMs to automatically derive stroke-level structures from character bitmaps without handcrafted data. It transforms modern logographic and ancient hieroglyphs character images into explicit, interpretable line-segment representations in a normalized coordinate space, allowing for cross-lingual generalization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that HieroSA effectively captures character-internal structures and semantics, bypassing the need for language-specific priors. Experimental results highlight the potential of our work as a graphematics analysis tool for a deeper understanding of hieroglyphic scripts."
}