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"Google DeepMind has developed an AI tool called Aeneas that can help historians decode and restore ancient Roman inscriptions. Trained on data from nearly 200,000 Latin texts, Aeneas can suggest missing words, date inscriptions within 13 years, and identify the province of origin with a fair level of accuracy."
"... Often, these texts are fragmentary, weathered or deliberately defaced. Restoring, dating and placing them is nearly impossible without contextual information, especially when comparing similar inscriptions.
Today, we’re publishing a paper in Nature introducing Aeneas, the first artificial intelligence (AI) model for contextualizing ancient inscriptions.
When working with ancient inscriptions, historians traditionally rely on their expertise and specialized resources to identify “parallels” — which are texts that share similarities in wording, syntax, standardized formulas or provenance.
Aeneas greatly accelerates this complex and time-consuming work. It reasons across thousands of Latin inscriptions, retrieving textual and contextual parallels in seconds that allow historians to interpret and build upon the model’s findings. ..."
From the abstract:
"Human history is born in writing. Inscriptions are among the earliest written forms, and offer direct insights into the thought, language and history of ancient civilizations. Historians capture these insights by identifying parallels—inscriptions with shared phrasing, function or cultural setting—to enable the contextualization of texts within broader historical frameworks, and perform key tasks such as restoration and geographical or chronological attribution1. However, current digital methods are restricted to literal matches and narrow historical scopes. Here we introduce Aeneas, a generative neural network for contextualizing ancient texts. Aeneas retrieves textual and contextual parallels, leverages visual inputs, handles arbitrary-length text restoration, and advances the state of the art in key tasks. To evaluate its impact, we conduct a large study with historians using outputs from Aeneas as research starting points. The historians find the parallels retrieved by Aeneas to be useful research starting points in 90% of cases, improving their confidence in key tasks by 44%. Restoration and geographical attribution tasks yielded superior results when historians were paired with Aeneas, outperforming both humans and artificial intelligence alone. For dating, Aeneas achieved a 13-year distance from ground-truth ranges. We demonstrate Aeneas’ contribution to historical workflows through analysis of key traits in the renowned Roman inscription Res Gestae Divi Augusti, showing how integrating science and humanities can create transformative tools to assist historians and advance our understanding of the past."
Google AI Tool That Fills Missing Words in Roman Inscriptions
Aeneas transforms how historians connect the past "Introducing the first model for contextualizing ancient inscriptions, designed to help historians better interpret, attribute and restore fragmentary texts."
Fig. 1: Restoration of a damaged inscription.
Fig. 3: Geographical attribution performance analysis (LED testing set).
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