Predicting the Past: AI for Ancient Texts

A project utilizing generative AI models, Ithaca and Aeneas, to collaborate with historians in restoring, dating, and attributing ancient Greek and Latin inscriptions.

This site presents Ithaca and Aeneas, two generative AI models developed (often in collaboration with Google DeepMind) to assist historians. Unlike typical predictive text models that forecast the future of a sentence, these models “predict the past” by analyzing damaged ancient inscriptions. They help fill in missing characters (restoration), estimate the geographic origin (attribution), and determine the timeframe (dating) of texts that have been eroded by time.

An (Open access) paper, an (Open source) GitHub repo and a Colab notebook are available.

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