garshana corpus
Dating Tablets in the Garshana Corpus
Hearne, James (Western Washington University) | Anderson, Connon (Western Washington University) | Liu, Yudong (Western Washington University) | Dixon, Dannon (Western Washington University) | Ritchie, Dario Fenstermacher (Western Washington University)
This paper reports on an effort to assign dates to undated tablets in the Garshana corpus, a fully curated and annotated collection of Sumerian tables from the Ur III era. Of the 1488 tablets, 92% are dated, giving a strong training set for dating those undated. Two approaches were pursued: (1) a naive one which determined the date of a tablet by simply counting the name overlap with tablets of known year and (2) invoking a collection of machine learning algorithms of established robustness. The naive method reports an accuracy of 45-55% and the machine learning algorithms achieve 78.8-84.15% accuracy.