--- title: "Akkadian and cuneiform NLP — papers and Mova" description: "Akkadian and cuneiform NLP: what the language and the script are, how Mova uses them for Aramaic and Hebrew, and our cards of the papers on it." canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/akkadian-cuneiform-nlp/" --- [Elamur Research](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/akkadian-cuneiform-nlp/) [home](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [topics](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/) / Akkadian and cuneiform NLP # 𒀭 Akkadian and cuneiform NLP 22 papers · the most cited first · [all topics](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/) The language of Babylon and Assyria and the wedge-shaped script it was written in. ## What it is Akkadian is the East Semitic language of ancient Mesopotamia, spoken and written for more than two thousand years in its Babylonian and Assyrian dialects. It was a language of empire and of letters: treaties, laws, omens, epics and everyday contracts survive on hundreds of thousands of clay tablets. Cuneiform is the script those tablets use: wedge-shaped signs pressed into wet clay with a reed. It was first made for Sumerian and later carried Akkadian, Hittite, Elamite and others. One sign can stand for a whole word or for a syllable, and most signs have several readings, so reading a tablet means choosing a reading for every sign. Cuneiform NLP turns that into tasks a machine can help with: transliterating signs, normalizing the transliteration into words, lemmatizing and analyzing the root-and-pattern verb, restoring broken passages and translating. The data is small and damaged, which is why rules and careful counting still matter here. ## How Mova does it Mova does not read Akkadian yet. It keeps the work on it on its Semitic shelf because Akkadian bears directly on the languages it does read: Biblical Aramaic took many words from Akkadian through the Assyrian and Babylonian administration, the oldest Aramaic inscriptions include an Akkadian–Aramaic bilingual, and the three languages share the root system that Mova's Hebrew and Aramaic segmenters are built around. - [The Aramaic lexicon, with its Akkadian loanwords](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/arc/lexicon/) - [The Aramaic family and its inscriptions](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/arc/family/) - [The Semitic shelf of the paper cards](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/sem/) - [How the paper cards are made](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/docs/paper-cards/) ## Papers - [Neural Decipherment via Minimum-Cost Flow: From Ugaritic to Linear B](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/acl-2019-luo-neural-decipherment-minimum-cost-flow/) — Jiaming Luo, Yuan Cao, Regina Barzilay · 2019 · 43 citations - [Filling the Gaps in Ancient Akkadian Texts: A Masked Language Modelling Approach](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/emnlp-2021-lazar-filling-gaps-ancient-akkadian-texts/) — Koren Lazar, Benny Saret, Asaf Yehudai, et al. · 2021 · 30 citations - [Akkadian Treebank for early Neo-Assyrian Royal Inscriptions](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/treebanks-2020-luukko-akkadian-treebank-early-neo-assyrian/) — Mikko Luukko, Aleksi Sahala, Sam Hardwick, et al. · 2020 · 13 citations - [Parsing Akkadian Verbs with Prolog](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/aclbulk-2002-macks-parsing-akkadian-verbs-prolog/) — Aaron Macks · 2002 · 13 citations - [Automated Phonological Transcription of Akkadian Cuneiform Text](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/lingbulk-2020-sahala-automated-phonological-transcription-akkadian-cuneiform/) — Aleksi Sahala, Miikka Silfverberg, Antti Arppe, et al. · 2020 · 10 citations - [A Morphological Analyzer for Akkadian Verbal Forms with a Model of Phonetic Transformations](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/aclbulk-1998-barthelemy-morphological-analyzer-akkadian-verbal-forms/) — Francois Barthelemy · 1998 · 10 citations - [Beyond Base Predictors: Using LLMs to Resolve Ambiguities in Akkadian Lemmatization](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/aclbulk-2025-riemenschneider-beyond-base-predictors-llms-resolve/) — Frederick Riemenschneider · 2025 · 4 citations - [Word Segmentation for Akkadian Cuneiform](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/lingbulk-2016-homburg-word-segmentation-akkadian-cuneiform/) — Timo Homburg, Christian Chiarcos · 2016 · 4 citations - [EvaCun 2025 Shared Task: Lemmatization and Token Prediction in Akkadian and Sumerian using LLMs](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/aclbulk-2025-gordin-evacun-2025-shared-task-lemmatization/) — Shai Gordin, Aleksi Sahala, Shahar Spencer, et al. · 2025 · 2 citations - [At the Crossroad of Cuneiform and NLP: Challenges for Fine-grained Part-of-speech Tagging](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/coling-2024-smidt-crossroad-cuneiform-nlp-challenges-fine/) — Gustav Ryberg Smidt, Els Lefever, Katrien de Graef · 2024 · 1 citation - [Transitive and Intransitive Verbs in Akkadian: A Case Study of the Epic of Gilgamesh Using Natural Language Processing](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/hussein-2023-transitive-intransitive-verbs-akkadian-case/) — Nabeel Nooruldeen Hussein · 2023 · 1 citation - [Une description morphologique structurée en arbre du verbe akkadien qui utilise des structures de traits et des transducteurs multirubans A Tree-Structured morphological description of the Akkadian verb which uses Feature Structures and Multi-tape Transducers](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/aclbulk-2009-barthelemy-une-description-morphologique-structuree-en/) — François Barthélémy · 2009 · 1 citation - [An Assortment of Articles in a Ugaritic Text](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/watson-2026-assortment-articles-ugaritic-text/) — Wilfred G.E. Watson · 2026 - [Does Ugaritic Go with Arabic in Semitic Genealogical Sub-Classification?](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/kaye-2026-ugaritic-go-arabic-semitic-genealogical/) — Alan S. Kaye · 2026 - [Elamite and Akkadian Translations of the Old Persian Periphrastic Perfect](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/skalmowski-2026-elamite-akkadian-translations-old-persian/) — Wojciech Skalmowski · 2026 - [From Glosses to the Linguistic Nature of Canaano-Akkadian](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/andrason-2026-glosses-linguistic-nature-canaano-akkadian/) — Alexander Andrason, Juan-Pablo Vita · 2026 - [From Hair to Heel: Ugaritic Terms for Parts of the Body](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/watson-2026-hair-heel-ugaritic-terms-parts/) — Wilfred G.E. Watson · 2026 - [TabletCraft: Bridging a 4,000-Year Cultural Gap with Bidirectional Akkadian NMT and Cuneiform Rendering](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/coref-2026-wang-tabletcraft-bridging-4-000-year/) — Zhaohui Geoffrey Wang · 2026 - [Terms for Occupations, Professions and Social Classes in Ugaritic: An Etymological Study](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/watson-2026-terms-occupations-professions-social-classes/) — Wilfred G.E. Watson · 2026 - [Ugaritic Parallel of Jahwe melek ʿōlām](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/wozniak-2026-ugaritic-parallel-jahwe-melek-olam/) — Jerzy Woźniak · 2026 - [Evaluating the Performance of Transformers in Translating Low-Resource Languages through Akkadian](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/jones-2025-evaluating-performance-transformers-translating-low/) — Daniel A. Jones, Ruslan Mitkov · 2025 - [A First Look at the Ugaritic Poetic Text Corpus](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/lingbulk-2024-donicke-first-look-ugaritic-poetic-text/) — Tillmann Dönicke, Clemens Steinberger, Max-Ferdinand Zeterberg, et al. · 2024 - [next topic → Ancient Greek](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/ancient-greek/) - [↑ back to topics](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/)