Towards the First Machine Translation System for Sumerian Transliterations

Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 3454–3460 Barcelona, Spain (Online), December 8-13, 2020 3454 Towards the First Machine Translation System for Sumerian Transliterations Ravneet Punia Delhi Technological University, India ravneetpunia bt2 K16@dtu.ac.in Niko Schenk∗ Amazon Berlin, Germany nikosch@ amazon.com Christian Chiarcos Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany chiarcos@cs.uni- frankfurt.de ´Emilie Pag´e-Perron University of Toronto, Canada epp@ucla.edu Abstract 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 auto- matically. 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 trans- lations. 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. 1 Introduction Sumerian is the first recorded written language of mankind. A specific logo-syllabic script – Sumerian cuneiform – was used to record a variety of every-day events of ancient Mesopotamia, such as temple activities, business, trading or myths for a period of about 3,000 years. These texts were engraved on clay tablets using a reed stylus and are important for understand- ing the historical context of the Mesopotamian culture. An example is shown in Figure 1. Figure 1: Example artifact of a cuneiform tablet with transliterated Sumerian text, Ur III period, Gar- shana, Mesopotamia (CDLI No. P323253), picture reproduced with kind permission by David I. Owen. Aside from great traditions in literature and mathematics that contributed to the foundations of modern religion and science alike, cuneiform languages provide a largely uninterrupted record of administrative and economic transactions for a period of approximately 3,000 years, and thus play an important role in the development and evaluation of modern theories of economy and historical sociology (Weber, 1976). Among cuneiform languages, Sumerian serves a partic- ularly prominent role, as many aspects of the Sumerian language have been preserved in the writing of subsequent (Akkadian, Babylonian, Assyrian, Hittite) cultures. In particular, the use of Sumerograms (expressions in Sumerian) con- tinued throughout the entire cuneiform tradition. Here, we focus on a corpus from the limited time span (approx. 2100 - 2000 BCE) when Mesopotamia was united under rule of the Ur III dynasty – which established an extensive admin- istrative apparatus and from which the majority ∗Work was done prior to joining Amazon at Goethe University Frankfurt. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence. Licence details: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 3455 of Sumerian documents originates. Overall, the Ur III corpus comprises 72,000 transcribed texts, out of which only 1,573 (2.2%) are available with translations. Many pieces of Sumerian literature have been carefully edited and translated, but this material dates from periods when Sumerian was actually no longer a spoken language. Much of the material of our corpus on the …

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