Evidence · Unread oracle bone characters

OBSD generates plausible modern glyphs for read oracle-bone graphs and was judged best paper at ACL 2024.

Suggestive0

What it means

Key questionWhat are the roughly 3,000 unread oracle-bone graphs, and how many of them can ever be read?

6 answers, none ahead yet

Openunchanged

Answer this evidence bears onModels will propose readings experts confirm

Supports1 for, 1 against

Still possibleunchanged

Next steps 3

Download HUST-OBC (Figshare 10.6084/m9.figshare.25040543.v3), tabulate the 9,411 undeciphered classes by image count and source, and cluster them with a period-aware image-similarity merge; report how many distinct unread classes remain and how many are singletons.

~16 h

On: What are the roughly 3,000 unread oracle-bone graphs, and how many of them can ever be read?

—not judged

Using CHANT or Yinqi Wenyuan transcriptions, classify a random sample of 300 unread graphs by the slot they occupy in the divination formula (diviner name, ancestor, place after a hunting verb, verb, object, modifier) and estimate the share that occur only in name slots, with a confidence interval.

~24 h

On: What are the roughly 3,000 unread oracle-bone graphs, and how many of them can ever be read?

—not judged

Compile the list of readings accepted by the National Museum of Chinese Writing since 2016 (Jiang Yubin 2018, the 2023 batch including Zhou Zhongbing and Li Chuntao, Chen Jian and Xie Mingwen 2024) with their graphs and papers, as the held-out test set for any computational method.

~6 h

On: What are the roughly 3,000 unread oracle-bone graphs, and how many of them can ever be read?

—not judged

Ranked by how likely each is to move the key question, for the time it takes

Sources 1

Deciphering Oracle Bone Language with Diffusion Models

Guan et al. 2024

SRC

Cite it

Mysteries Department. (2026). OBSD generates plausible modern glyphs for read oracle-bone graphs and was judged best paper at ACL 2024. [Evidence EVD0DEDTHKXFKA9]. https://mysteriesdept.com/r/EVD0DEDTHKXFKA9

@misc{mysteriesdept_evd0dedthkxfka9,
  title     = {OBSD generates plausible modern glyphs for read oracle-bone graphs and was judged best paper at ACL 2024.},
  author    = {{Mysteries Department}},
  year      = {2026},
  note      = {Evidence, catalog key EVD0DEDTHKXFKA9},
  url       = {https://mysteriesdept.com/r/EVD0DEDTHKXFKA9}
}