Decoding Ancient Oracle Bone Script via Generative Dictionary Retrieval
Understanding humanity's earliest writing systems is crucial for reconstructing civilization's origins, yet many ancient scripts remain undeciphered. Oracle Bone Script (OBS) from China's Shang dynasty exemplifies this challenge: only approximately 1,500 of roughly 4,600 characters have been decoded, and a substantial portion of these 3,000-year-old inscriptions remains only partially understood. Limited by extreme data scarcity, existing computational methods achieve under 3% accuracy on unseen characters -- the core palaeographic challenge. We overcome this by reframing decipherment from classification to dictionary-based retrieval. Using deep learning guided by character evolution prin...
| Authors | Yin Wu, Gangjian Zhang, Jiayu Chen et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.IR |
| Published | 1 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 1 April 2026 |
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