Contents Modelling of Neo-Sumerian Ur III Economic Text Corpus

This paper describes a system for processing economic documents written in the ancient Sumerian language. The system is application-oriented and takes advantage of the simplicity of ancient economy. We have developed an ontology for a selected branch of economic activities. We translate the documents into a meaning representation language by means of a semantic grammar. The meaning representation language is constructed in a way that allows us to handle massive ambiguity caused by: the specifics of the Sumerian writing system (signs' polyvalence, lack of mid-word signs), our incomplete knowledge of the Sumerian language and frequent damages of documents. The system is augmented with the capability of processing documents whose parts describe concepts not included in the ontology and grammar. As an effect we obtain a structural description of the documents contents in the meaning representation language, ready to use in historical research.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: COLING
• Authors: Wojciech Jaworski
• Keywords: Ancient Sumerian Language, COLING 2008, Computational Linguistics, Meaning Representation Language, Sumerian Language