The application of NLP in combination with Computer Vision for analysing ancient Greek handwritings on papyri

Data Linking Workshop 2023: Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing – Challenges in the Humanities

Greek papyrology has for decades distinguished itself in the field of Classics by its ability to embrace new technologies: almost all the transcriptions of the published documentary papyri are encoded in papyri.info while a powerful plateforme, trismegistos.org, provides a wealth of metadata (on texts, persons and places mentioned, words and linguistic irregularities). Digital images of papyri are more and more numerous and accessible via online catalogs of their owning institutions. This provides adapted conditions for efficient applications of AI-based methods. D-scribes project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation has addressed the questions of joining fragments, identifying writers and characterizing scripts (for instance for dating) using in priority Computer Vision approaches. This presentation will summarize the work already done and sketch how a combination with NLP methods is extremely promising to fine-tune the interpretations of the results and move forward to new research questions.

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