This article introduces the VISTA-SL project, which aims to create an integrated e-learning platform for four European sign languages: German Sign Language, Greek Sign Language, Irish Sign Language, and Dutch Sign Language. Designed as a complement to face-to-face classes, the VISTA-SL platform will combine expertise in sign language education and education technologies to provide an adaptive and interactive learning environment suitable for deaf, hard of hearing and hearing users seeking to learn a sign language, whether it constitutes their first language or not. Building on a co-ordinated curriculum that covers vocabulary, grammar and Deaf culture materials, the platform will provide video material presented by deaf L1 signers, together with games and gamification features to motivate learning, while also providing several assistive technologies. By leveraging cutting edge language processing and computer vision approaches, the platform will provide augmented reality feedback, 3D avatars and an LLM-based virtual instructor, as part of the learning environment. VISTA-SL is developed in collaboration with end-user focus groups, comprising deaf, hard of hearing and hearing individuals. This will serve to ensure that the educational platform aligns with the expectations and needs of its intended users.

We investigate the problem of restoring Mycenaean linear B clay tablets, dating from about 1400 B.C. to roughly 1200 B.C., by using text infilling methods based on machine learning models. Our goals here are: first to try to improve the results of the methods used in the related literature by focusing on the characteristics of the Mycenaean Linear B writing system (series D), second to examine the same problem for the first time on series A&B and finally to investigate transfer learning using series D as source and the smaller series A&B as target. Our results show promising results in the supervised learning tasks, while further investigation is needed to better exploit the merits of transfer learning.

We present our work towards a dataset of Mycenaean Linear B sequences gathered from the Mycenaean inscriptions written in the 13th and 14th century B.C. (c. 1400-1200 B.C.). The dataset contains sequences of Mycenaean words and ideograms according to the rules of the Mycenaean Greek language in the Late Bronze Age. Our ultimate goal is to contribute to the study, reading and understanding of ancient scripts and languages. Focusing on sequences, we seek to exploit the structure of the entire language, not just the Mycenaean vocabulary, to analyse sequential patterns. We use the dataset to experiment on estimating the missing symbols in damaged inscriptions.