Towards the first machine translation system for Sumerian transliterations

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.

Metadaten
Author:	Ravneet Punia, Niko Schenk, Christian Chiarcos ORCiD GND, Émilie Pagé-Perron
URN:	urn:nbn:de:bvb:384-opus4-1040027
Frontdoor URL	https://opus.bibliothek.uni-augsburg.de/opus4/104002
URL:	https://aclanthology.org/2020.coling-main.308
ISBN:	978-1-952148-27-9OPAC
Parent Title (English):	Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, December 8-13, 2020, Barcelona, Spain (Online)
Publisher:	International Committee on Computational Linguistics
Place of publication:	Stroudsburg, PA
Editor:	Donia Scott, Nuria Bel, Chengqing Zong
Type:	Conference Proceeding
Language:	English
Year of first Publication:	2020
Publishing Institution:	Universität Augsburg
Release Date:	2023/05/15
First Page:	3454
Last Page:	3460
DOI:	https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2020.coling-main.308
Institutes:	Philologisch-Historische Fakultät
	Philologisch-Historische Fakultät / Angewandte Computerlinguistik
	Philologisch-Historische Fakultät / Angewandte Computerlinguistik / Lehrstuhl für Angewandte Computerlinguistik (ACoLi)
Dewey Decimal Classification:	4 Sprache / 40 Sprache / 400 Sprache
Licence (German):	CC-BY 4.0: Creative Commons: Namensnennung (mit Print on Demand)

Open Access