Towards the First Machine Translation System for Sumerian Transliterations

Ravneet Punia, Niko Schenk, Christian Chiarcos, Émilie Pagé-Perron

Abstract
The Sumerian cuneiform script was invented more than 5,000 years ago and represents one of the oldest in history. We present the first attempt to translate Sumerian texts into English automatically. We publicly release high-quality corpora for standardized training and evaluation and report results on experiments with supervised, phrase-based, and transfer learning techniques for machine translation. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations indicate the usefulness of the translations. Our proposed methodology provides a broader audience of researchers with novel access to the data, accelerates the costly and time-consuming manual translation process, and helps them better explore the relationships between Sumerian cuneiform and Mesopotamian culture.
Anthology ID:
2020.coling-main.308
Volume:
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
December
Year:
2020
Address:
Barcelona, Spain (Online)
Editors:
Donia Scott, Nuria Bel, Chengqing Zong
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
International Committee on Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3454–3460
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.coling-main.308
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.coling-main.308
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ravneet Punia, Niko Schenk, Christian Chiarcos, and Émilie Pagé-Perron. 2020. Towards the First Machine Translation System for Sumerian Transliterations. In Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 3454–3460, Barcelona, Spain (Online). International Committee on Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Towards the First Machine Translation System for Sumerian Transliterations (Punia et al., COLING 2020)
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