Text Restoration of Ancient Documents with Language Models
Purpose - This study investigates the feasibility of restoring missing text caused by physical lacunae in damaged ancient manuscripts using language models. Methodology - The study proposes different scenarios to replicate real-world conditions. Language models of different architectures are applied according to their suitability to each scenario. We also propose several decoding strategies that further enhance performance and address the discrepancy between lacuna boundaries and the models' tokenization schemes. Findings - The results reveal that text restoration of these documents cannot be fully automated, but it can serve as a useful tool to assist paleographers in their work. Model p...
| Authors | Shibingfeng Zhang, Edoardo Caraffa, Annafelicia Zuffrano et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 28 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 28 August 2026 |
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