BIRD: Bronze Inscription Restoration and Dating

Wenjie Hua, Hoang H Nguyen, Gangyan Ge


Abstract
Bronze inscriptions from early China are fragmentary and difficult to date. We introduce BIRD (Bronze Inscription Restoration and Dating), a fully encoded dataset grounded in standard scholarly transcriptions and chronological labels. We further propose an allograph-aware masked language modeling framework that integrates domain- and task-adaptive pretraining with a Glyph Net (GN), which links graphemes and allographs. Experiments show that GN improves restoration, while glyph-biased sampling yields gains in dating.
Anthology ID:
2025.emnlp-main.1073
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2025
Address:
Suzhou, China
Editors:
Christos Christodoulopoulos, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Carolyn Rose, Violet Peng
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
21189–21201
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.emnlp-main.1073/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Wenjie Hua, Hoang H Nguyen, and Gangyan Ge. 2025. BIRD: Bronze Inscription Restoration and Dating. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 21189–21201, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
BIRD: Bronze Inscription Restoration and Dating (Hua et al., EMNLP 2025)
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