Evidence · Unread cuneiform: half a million tablets and the limits of Sumerian
The same study reports hallucinated output, weaker results on long and logogram-heavy lines, and test sentences drawn…
The same study reports hallucinated output, weaker results on long and logogram-heavy lines, and test sentences drawn from the training corpora, so no cross-genre or unpublished-text performance is known.
What it means
Key questionCan machines read the cuneiform tablets that no scholar has read?
5 answers, none ahead yet
Openunchanged
Answer this evidence bears onMachine translation scales to the backlog
Counts against2 for, 1 against
Still possibleunchanged
Next steps 5
1
Genre-transfer test: train a transliteration-to-English model on the Akkademia ORACC splits (Neo-Assyrian royal inscriptions), evaluate unchanged on ORACC Old Babylonian letters and on SumTablets-linked Ur III texts with English, and report BLEU/chrF against the in-genre held-out score.
~16 h
—not judged
2
Run the genre-transfer test of Akkadian NMT on Old Babylonian letters and Ur III texts.
~16 h
—not judged
3
Glyph-to-transliteration baseline on the stored SumTablets test split (sha256 65dfe606…): train on the public train split, report sign-reading accuracy by period and genre, and compare with Akkademia's 96.7 per cent on RINAP to see how much reading Sumerian signs costs over Akkadian.
~10 h
—not judged
4
Measure the backlog: from the CDLI bulk dump (cdli_cat.csv plus cdliatf_unblocked.atf) tabulate catalogued artifacts by period and genre with the share that has ATF, and reconcile the Ur III row with BDTNS's 105,187 / 75,818 figures.
~6 h
—not judged
Ranked by how likely each is to move the key question, for the time it takesAll 5 on the question
Sources 1
Translating Akkadian to English with neural machine translation
SRCGutherz et al. 2023
Cite it
Mysteries Department. (2026). The same study reports hallucinated output, weaker results on long and logogram-heavy lines, and test sentences drawn… [Evidence EVD0DEDXNXMGRAR]. https://mysteriesdept.com/r/EVD0DEDXNXMGRAR
@misc{mysteriesdept_evd0dedxnxmgrar,
title = {The same study reports hallucinated output, weaker results on long and logogram-heavy lines, and test sentences drawn…},
author = {{Mysteries Department}},
year = {2026},
note = {Evidence, catalog key EVD0DEDXNXMGRAR},
url = {https://mysteriesdept.com/r/EVD0DEDXNXMGRAR}
}