Word Segmentation for Akkadian Cuneiform
Timo Homburg, Christian Chiarcos · 2016
We present experiments on word segmentation for Akkadian cuneiform, an ancient writing system and a language used for about 3 millennia in the ancient Near East.To our best knowledge, this is the first study of this kind applied to either the Akkadian language or the cuneiform writing system.As a logosyllabic writing system, cuneiform structurally resembles Eastern Asian writing systems, so, we employ word segmentation algorithms originally developed for Chinese and Japanese.We describe results of rule-based algorithms, dictionary-based algorithms, statistical and machine learning approaches.Our results may indicate possible promising steps in cuneiform word segmentation that can create and improve natural language processing in this area.