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Expanding

Digital

Assyriology

with

Machine Learning

Émilie Pagé-Perron

University of Toronto

Leipzig, March 21st 2017

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Outline

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  • State of NLP for "cuneiform languages"
  • Roadblocks to the expansion of methodologies
  • Possible solutions
  • Concrete actions at the CDLI

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© Michel Royon / Wikimedia Commons

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Way back CDLI

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1998

2003

2010

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http://cdli.ucla.edu

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Access: Licenses and technical barriers

Restrictive licenses

Scraper required

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CDLI in numbers

  • 320,000 individual cuneiform texts
  • 2.65 million of lines of transliteration
  • 300,000 archival images (TIFF and some RTI)

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Encoding standards

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CDLI-ATF

ORACC-ATF

Steve Tinney & Eleanor Robson, Oracc: The Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus

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Challenges brought by encoding schemes

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  • Their multiplicity
  • Some are not computer readable ready
  • Variation in the level of text structure information they encode

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Nammu

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Limitations in current methods

  • High human involvement requirement
  • Contextual disambiguation not available

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Statistical methods

  • Social Network Analysis
  • Semantic Network Analysis
  • Topic Analysis
  • Other colocation and clustering tasks

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Sara Brumfield 2013

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Machine Translation and Automated Analysis of Cuneiform Languages (MTAAC)

University of Toronto Heather Baker (Assyriology)

Émilie Pagé-Perron (Assyriology)

UCLA Robert K. Englund (Assyriology)

Prashant Rajput (Comp. Sc.)

University of Frankfurt Christian Chiarcos (Comp ling.)

Maria Sukhareva (Comp ling.)

Ilya Khait (Assyriology)

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Administrative accounts

  • Represent 90% of all cuneiform inscriptions
  • Remain mostly untranslated
  • Rich in information about society and economy
  • Mostly homogeneous and formulaic

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NLP Pipeline

  • Pre-processing
  • Morphological analysis
  • Part of Speech tagging
  • Syntactic parsing

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Ontologies

Adopted:

  • Ontologies of Linguistic Annotation

Potential:

  • CIDOC-CRM (ModRef Project)
  • Pleiades
  • PeriodO
  • Snap:drgn

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"If Open Access is about removing barriers, Linked Open Data is about creating bridges."

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Preservation and sustainability

  • Public repositories for data & code

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  • Multiple international backup and service mirrors

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  • Codebase maintenance and update�

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International Backups

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CDLI Framework Update Project "Phoenix"

  • Make the code base more sustainable
  • Document the initiative code and practice throughout
  • Enable graduate students in the humanities to code extensions themselves
  • Renew data displays for usability
  • Become a model of best practice in web accessibility�

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Salient points

  • Shared encoding scheme for cuneiform languages
  • Shared NLP toolkit
  • Integrating machine learning into research methods
  • Multidisciplinary collaboration
  • Linked Open Data �

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Thank you!

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Contact

Émilie Pagé-Perron

Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations

University of Toronto

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epageperron@gmail.com

@sohnyrin

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CDLI

Robert K. Englund, UCLA, Director

Jürgen Renn, MPIWG, Co-Director

Jacob Dahl, University of Oxford, Co-PI

Bertrand Lafont, CNRS, Co-PI

Émilie Pagé-Perron, UofT, Co-PI

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Collaborators

Christian Chiarcos, University of Frankfurt

Maria Sukhareva, University of Frankfurt

Ilya Khait, Berlin Free University