---
title: "Building a Corpus and Database for Rare and Undeciphered"
description: "Building on their earlier DECRYPT work on historical ciphers, the authors present the design of DESCRYPT, a worldwide… 80 references."
authors: ["Beata Megyesi", "Rune Rattenborg", "Benedek Láng", "Michelle Waldispühl", "Mihály Héder"]
year: 2026
venue: "Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Language Technologies for Historical and Ancient Languages (LT4HALA 2026) @ LREC 2026"
source: "https://aclanthology.org/2026.lt4hala-1.17/"
doi: "10.63317/3w96kx3i86uo"
licence: "CC BY-NC 4.0 (ELRA, LREC proceedings)"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/megyesi-2026-building-corpus-database-rare-undeciphered/"
---
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# Building a Corpus and Database for Rare and Undeciphered Scripts

**Authors:** [Beata Megyesi](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/beata-megyesi/), Rune Rattenborg, Benedek Láng, Michelle Waldispühl and Mihály Héder · **Year:** 2026 · **Venue:** [Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Language Technologies for Historical and Ancient Languages (LT4HALA 2026) @ LREC 2026](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/lt4hala/) ([Workshop on Language Technologies for Historical and Ancient Languages @ LREC 2026](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/lt4hala/2026/)) · **Publisher:** [European Language Resources Association (ELRA)](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/publishers/european-language-resources-association-elra/) · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC 4.0 (ELRA, LREC proceedings)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/2026.lt4hala-1.17/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/2026.lt4hala-1.17.pdf) · [DOI 10.63317/3w96kx3i86uo](https://doi.org/10.63317/3w96kx3i86uo) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W7166593973)

**Citations:** 0 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14)

## Summary

Texts in rare or still-undeciphered writing systems, such as Linear A, Proto-Elamite tablets, Rongorongo and the Voynich manuscript, are mostly out of reach for computational methods. HTR and OCR tools need large labeled training sets and stable encodings, and these scripts often lack even Unicode support. Building on their earlier DECRYPT work on historical ciphers, the authors present the design of DESCRYPT, a worldwide corpus and database for such sources.

It covers three groups: ancient inscriptions, manuscripts with specialized or hybrid notations (such as shorthand), and encrypted or encoded documents from later periods. Records combine high-quality images, transliterations, transcriptions, linguistic annotation and metadata in a single data model built for non-standard, low-resource symbol systems. Sign inventories are planned. The paper describes the collection and digitization workflow, the metadata scheme and the database architecture, and shows uses in analysis and decipherment.

The main contribution is infrastructure rather than benchmark scores. It gives philology, linguistics, cryptology and computer science a shared, interoperable basis for reproducible research and for building models with little training data.

## Key points

- The resource is called DESCRYPT. It extends the DECRYPT project and its resources: the DECODE cipher database, the HistCorp historical corpora and the CrypTool 2 cryptanalysis tool. The scope widens from early modern European ciphers to rare scripts worldwide.
- Source types are:
  - ancient inscriptions (for instance runic and Ajami texts, Cuneiform, both Linear A and Linear B, Old South Arabian, and Linear Elamite alongside Proto-Elamite);
  - shorthand, artificial-language and mixed-symbol manuscripts;
  - encrypted diplomatic, scientific, private, political or religious documents.
- The design follows FAIR principles and Linguistic Linked Open Data (LLOD), and is compatible with CLARIN and ELRA infrastructures.
- For comparison, existing artifact corpora vary widely in size. Cuneiform has over 550,000 inscriptions, Latin about 500,000, Greek about 200,000, Runic about 8,000 and Linear B about 6,000. Many isolated rare-script sources are not covered by any of these.
- The authors argue that platforms like Transkribus and eScriptorium are unsuitable for these scripts because they depend on large training sets. This motivates tools and data built for minimal annotation.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

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- [University of Oslo](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/university-of-oslo/) — University, Oslo, Norway · 51 works · 4,155 citations
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- [Budapest University of Technology and Economics](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/budapest-university-of-technology-and-economics/) — University, Budapest, Hungary · 4 works · 688 citations
- [HUN-REN Institute for Computer Science and Control](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/labs/hun-ren-institute-for-computer-science-and-control/) — Research institute, Budapest, Hungary · 2 works · 26 citations
- [Eötvös Loránd University](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/eotvos-lorand-university/) — University, Budapest, Hungary · 5 works · 256 citations

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## Cite

Cite as: Beata Megyesi, Rune Rattenborg, Benedek Láng, Michelle Waldispühl and Mihály Héder. 2026. Building a Corpus and Database for Rare and Undeciphered Scripts. Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Language Technologies for Historical and Ancient Languages (LT4HALA 2026) @ LREC 2026.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@inproceedings{megyesi2026building,
  title = {{Building a Corpus and Database for Rare and Undeciphered Scripts}},
  author = {Beata Megyesi, Rune Rattenborg, Benedek Láng, Michelle Waldispühl and Mihály Héder},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Language Technologies for Historical and Ancient Languages (LT4HALA 2026) @ LREC 2026},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.63317/3w96kx3i86uo},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.63317/3w96kx3i86uo}
}
```

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*Updated 1 November 2026*