Machine Translation and Automated Analysis of Cuneiform Languages (MTAAC)

FAIN: HJ-253601-17

UCLA; Regents of the University of California, Los Angeles (Los Angeles, CA 90024-4201)
Robert Keith Englund (Project Director: June 2016 to March 2022)
Heather D. Baker (Co Project Director: June 2016 to March 2022)
Christian Chiarcos (Co Project Director: June 2016 to March 2022)

Participating institutions:
University of California, Los Angeles (Los Angeles, CA) - Applicant/Recipient
University of Frankfurt (Frankfurt am Main) - Participating Institution
University of Toronto (Toronto) - Participating Institution

A collaboration among ancient studies scholars, linguists, and computer scientists from the United States, Canada, and Germany to develop computational techniques for translating ancient administrative records stored on cuneiform tablets. The project team includes scholars and scientists from the University of California, Los Angeles, (US), the University of Toronto (Canada), and the University of Frankfurt (Germany). Co-funding provided by SSHRC (Canada) and DFG (Germany).

Ancient Mesopotamia, birthplace of writing, has produced vast numbers of cuneiform tablets that only a handful of highly specialized scholars are able to read. The task of studying them is so labor intensive that the vast majority have not yet been translated, with the result that their contents are not accessible either to historians in other fields or to the wider public. This project will develop and apply new computerised methods to translate and analyse the contents of some 67,000 highly standardised administrative documents from southern Mesopotamia from the 21st century BC. By automating these basic but labor-intensive processes, we will free up scholars’ time. The tools that we will develop, combining machine learning, statistical and neural machine translation technologies, may then be applied to other ancient languages. Similarly, the translations themselves, and the historical, social and economic data extracted from them, will be made publicly available on the web.

Associated Products

Machine assisted translation of cuneiform texts (Blog Post)
Title: Machine assisted translation of cuneiform texts
Author: Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative
Abstract: The CDLI is delighted to announce that the international research collaboration Machine Translation and Automated Analysis of Cuneiform Languages (MTAAC) has been funded through the Trans-Atlantic Platform Digging into Data Challenge by the American National Endowment for the Humanities, the German Research Foundation, and the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.
Date: 4/3/2017
Primary URL: https://cdli.ucla.edu/?q=news/machine-assisted-translation-cuneiform-texts
Website: Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative

Machine Translation and Automated Analysis of Cuneiform Languages (Web Resource)
Title: Machine Translation and Automated Analysis of Cuneiform Languages
Author: Robert Englund
Author: Heather Baker
Author: Christian Chiarcos
Abstract: The MTAAC project develops and applies new computerized methods to translate and analyze the contents of some 67,000 highly standardized administrative documents from southern Mesopotamia (ancient Iraq) from the 21st century BC. Our methodology, which combines machine learning with statistical and neural machine translation technologies, can then be applied to other ancient languages. This methodology, the translations, and the historical, social and economic data extracted from them, will be offered to the public in open access.
Year: 2016
Primary URL: https://cdli-gh.github.io/mtaac/

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