Abstract
Knowing our past can help us better understand our future. The explosive development of NLP in these past few decades has allowed us to study ancient languages and cultures in ways that we couldn’t have done in the past. However, not all languages have received the same level of attention. Despite its popularity in pop culture, the languages spoken in Ancient Egypt have been somewhat overlooked in terms of NLP research. In this paper we give an overview of how NLP has been used to study different variations of the Ancient Egyptian languages. This not only includes Old, Middle, and Late Egyptian but also Demotic and Coptic. We begin our survey paper by giving a short introduction to these languages and their writing systems, before talking about the corpora and lexical resources that are available digitally. We then show the different NLP tasks that have been tackled for different variations of Ancient Egyptian, as well as the approaches that have been used. We hope that our work can stoke interest in the study of these languages within the NLP community.- Anthology ID:
- 2024.lt4hala-1.18
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Language Technologies for Historical and Ancient Languages (LT4HALA) @ LREC-COLING-2024
- Month:
- May
- Year:
- 2024
- Address:
- Torino, Italia
- Editors:
- Rachele Sprugnoli, Marco Passarotti
- Venues:
- LT4HALA | WS
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- ELRA and ICCL
- Note:
- Pages:
- 156–169
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2024.lt4hala-1.18
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Ricardo Muñoz Sánchez. 2024. When Hieroglyphs Meet Technology: A Linguistic Journey through Ancient Egypt Using Natural Language Processing. In Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Language Technologies for Historical and Ancient Languages (LT4HALA) @ LREC-COLING-2024, pages 156–169, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
- Cite (Informal):
- When Hieroglyphs Meet Technology: A Linguistic Journey through Ancient Egypt Using Natural Language Processing (Muñoz Sánchez, LT4HALA-WS 2024)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/naacl-24-ws-corrections/2024.lt4hala-1.18.pdf