There are several challenges in translating an ancient language like Akkadian. Clay tablets are rarely completely preserved. As a result, MT is affected by the lack of context. Another challenge is the complex logophonetic nature of cuneiform, i.e. signs can have one of three functions: logograms, determinatives and phonograms/syllabograms. Therefore, cuneiform signs are polyvalent and have several readings for each function. Sometimes, even experts cannot figure out the proper sign value.

Experts do not translate directly to a modern language from the ancient cuneiform signs. They first gauge the context of each sign in each sequence – a process which is called transliteration, resulting in a transcription of the cuneiform signs in the Latin alphabet. The first step of transliteration is considered in computational terms to be another sort of translation task. It can include word segmentation, as cuneiform practically lacks any sort of punctuation marks, therefore, cuneiform translation is considered a more complex translation task than transcription translation. Cuneiform translation requires translation between two different scripts, Unicode cuneiform glyphs to Latin script, as well as identification of word segmentation. The act of transliteration not only removes the levels of sign and word ambiguity from the cuneiform signs, it also simplifies the task of translation between the same script type.

Another issue to consider when translating Akkadian is the different styles of each text genre. The more formulaic the genre of the source, the more accurate the translation will be. Generally, administrative and divinatory texts tend to be very formulaic. Furthermore, texts in Akkadian are rarely written entirely syllabically, as described above, and almost all of them use Sumerian logograms (transliterated in capital letters). Certain genres, such as divination literature, use logograms profusely, with many sentences made up only of logograms. Often, the names of people, places, and temples are themselves complex sentences written using logograms.

Task Objectives

The goals of the translation task are:

To investigate the applicability of current MT techniques when translating Akkadian into English.
To examine the difference between translating from the cuneiform source and the Latin transcription.
To create publicly available corpora for machine translation and evaluation of Akkadian and Sumerian.
To provide practical experience of the most advanced machine translation methods for beginners in the field of machine translation.
To prompt the development of machine translation research for Akkadian and Sumerian and advance the forefront of machine translation technology exploration.

Task Requirements

We will provide parallel corpora of English-Akkadian and Cuneiform-Akkadian Transcription, and Sumerian-English, as well as provide several multilingual models such as RoBERTa for English. The goal is to improve the model and enhance machine translation performance.

You can choose to participate in any of the tasks, and we will use the same metrics for evaluation. You can use other models and resources to build the translation system or just build your own model. However, if additional data is used, participants should clearly indicate which data is from the provided dataset and which is from external sources. This will allow us to evaluate the performance of the models on our provided dataset separately from their performance on external data.

Each participant should include a brief introduction of their translation system when submitting, including basic information such as the models (if any), techniques, methods used, etc. Each participant should submit a technical report emphasizing improvements made to the model, techniques used, and methods applied.

Although the primary objective of this evaluation is to identify the most exceptional machine translation system, we encourage participation even if your approach does not achieve the highest performance. If you have developed an interesting approach, this evaluation provides an opportunity to further refine and enhance your system.