Dataset Information

Restoring and attributing ancient texts using deep neural networks.

ABSTRACT: Ancient history relies on disciplines such as epigraphy-the study of inscribed texts known as inscriptions-for evidence of the thought, language, society and history of past civilizations¹. However, over the centuries, many inscriptions have been damaged to the point of illegibility, transported far from their original location and their date of writing is steeped in uncertainty. Here we present Ithaca, a deep neural network for the textual restoration, geographical attribution and chronological attribution of ancient Greek inscriptions. Ithaca is designed to assist and expand the historian's workflow. The architecture of Ithaca focuses on collaboration, decision support and interpretability. While Ithaca alone achieves 62% accuracy when restoring damaged texts, the use of Ithaca by historians improved their accuracy from 25% to 72%, confirming the synergistic effect of this research tool. Ithaca can attribute inscriptions to their original location with an accuracy of 71% and can date them to less than 30 years of their ground-truth ranges, redating key texts of Classical Athens and contributing to topical debates in ancient history. This research shows how models such as Ithaca can unlock the cooperative potential between artificial intelligence and historians, transformationally impacting the way that we study and write about one of the most important periods in human history.

SUBMITTER: Assael Y

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8907065 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Publications

Restoring and attributing ancient texts using deep neural networks.

Assael Yannis Y Sommerschield Thea T Shillingford Brendan B Bordbar Mahyar M Pavlopoulos John J Chatzipanagiotou Marita M Androutsopoulos Ion I Prag Jonathan J de Freitas Nando N

Nature 20220309 7900

Ancient history relies on disciplines such as epigraphy-the study of inscribed texts known as inscriptions-for evidence of the thought, language, society and history of past civilizations<sup>1</sup>. However, over the centuries, many inscriptions have been damaged to the point of illegibility, transported far from their original location and their date of writing is steeped in uncertainty. Here we present Ithaca, a deep neural network for the textual restoration, geographical attribution and ch ...[more]

PMID: 35264762

Similar Datasets

Project description:Early identification of individuals at risk of developing Alzheimer's disease (AD) dementia is important for developing disease-modifying therapies. In this study, given multimodal AD markers and clinical diagnosis of an individual from one or more timepoints, we seek to predict the clinical diagnosis, cognition and ventricular volume of the individual for every month (indefinitely) into the future. We proposed and applied a minimal recurrent neural network (minimalRNN) model to data from The Alzheimer's Disease Prediction Of Longitudinal Evolution (TADPOLE) challenge, comprising longitudinal data of 1677 participants (Marinescu et al., 2018) from the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI). We compared the performance of the minimalRNN model and four baseline algorithms up to 6 years into the future. Most previous work on predicting AD progression ignore the issue of missing data, which is a prevalent issue in longitudinal data. Here, we explored three different strategies to handle missing data. Two of the strategies treated the missing data as a "preprocessing" issue, by imputing the missing data using the previous timepoint ("forward filling") or linear interpolation ("linear filling). The third strategy utilized the minimalRNN model itself to fill in the missing data both during training and testing ("model filling"). Our analyses suggest that the minimalRNN with "model filling" compared favorably with baseline algorithms, including support vector machine/regression, linear state space (LSS) model, and long short-term memory (LSTM) model. Importantly, although the training procedure utilized longitudinal data, we found that the trained minimalRNN model exhibited similar performance, when using only 1 input timepoint or 4 input timepoints, suggesting that our approach might work well with just cross-sectional data. An earlier version of our approach was ranked 5th (out of 53 entries) in the TADPOLE challenge in 2019. The current approach is ranked 2nd out of 63 entries as of June 3rd, 2020.

Dataset Information

Restoring and attributing ancient texts using deep neural networks.

Publications

Restoring and attributing ancient texts using deep neural networks.

Similar Datasets

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

Tweets