TabletCraft: Bridging a 4,000-Year Cultural Gap with Bidirectional Akkadian NMT and Cuneiform Rendering
Year: 2026
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: Half a million cuneiform clay tablets survive in museums worldwide, yet modern users can neither read nor write in the world's oldest writing system, leaving a 4,000-year cultural barrier that existing NLP tools have only partially addressed.Prior work enables one-way, scholar-oriented translation from Akkadian to English, but offers no path in the reverse direction: non-specialist users cannot compose new content in cuneiform, and therefore remain passive consumers of ancient culture rather than active participants.We present TABLETCRAFT, the first open-source system that enables bidirectional interaction with Mesopotamian writing.Users can read ancient tablets (Akkadian→English) and compose new messages as cuneiform clay tablets (English→Akkadian→cuneiform→rendered tablet).The system integrates a ByT5-based translation model trained on 116K bidirectional samples, a cuneiform sign converter with 14,240 mappings (95.3% coverage), and a visual tablet renderer, packaged as a pip-installable toolkit with CLI and web demo.On the held-out Akkademia validation split (2,812 samples), we report 49.1 BLEU for Ak→En and 48.5 BLEU for En→Ak, the first published quantitative result in the reverse direction.
Author: Zhaohui Geoffrey Wang
Institution: University of Southern California
Subfield: Artificial Intelligence
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: gold
OpenAlex ID: W7166884882
FWCI:
Cites:
Cited by:
Related to: