Sign Clustering and Topic Extraction in Proto-Elamite

Code

• github.com/sfu-natlang/pe-decipher-toolkit
  OfficialIn papernone★ 0

Abstract

We describe a first attempt at using techniques from computational linguistics to analyze the undeciphered proto-Elamite script. Using hierarchical clustering, n-gram frequencies, and LDA topic models, we both replicate results obtained by manual decipherment and reveal previously-unobserved relationships between signs. This demonstrates the utility of these techniques as an aid to manual decipherment.

Tasks

Reproductions