Oxford historians apply state-of-the-art AI to transform the study of ancient texts

Researchers in the Classics Faculty of the University of Oxford in collaboration with the Department of Humanities of Ca' Foscari University of Venice, the Department of Informatics of the Athens University of Economics and Business, and Google's DeepMind have begun applying state-of-the-art machine learning research to transform the study of ancient Greek texts. Ithaca is the first deep neural network that can aid historians in not only restoring the missing text of damaged inscriptions, but also identifying their original location, and establishing the date they were written. In a new research paper, published today by the scientific journal, Nature, the researchers have already used Ithaca to redate a series of important Athenian decrees from the 5th century BCE. 'The huge quantity of evidence from the ancient world, whether texts or objects, keeps on growing, and is increasingly beyond the scope of individual historians to master, even as we work to make sense of it and to make it more accessible. The application of AI to this data, as Ithaca demonstrates, presents incredible opportunities – ancient history has an exciting future.'