Academic libraries across the globe are stuffed with hundreds of thousands of Ancient Greek papyrus fragments. Though many are so damaged that their meaning is probably lost, scholars have the ability to restore the rest by methodically filling in missing words or phrases. To accelerate that laborious task, researchers have turned to artificial intelligence.
\n\nOn Wednesday, the Austrian Academy of Science will release “the world’s first advanced large language model for Ancient Greek,” developed in partnership with French AI lab Mistral and technology services firm Sail Reply. The model, Apollo, is trained on roughly 600 million historical Greek words drawn from manuscripts, papyri, and inscriptions.
\n\nThe model will be freely available to academics through a chatbot interface. The ambition is to help scholars to more rapidly identify papyrus fragments relevant to their specific sub-disciplines, as well as promising new avenues of research. Where documents are tattered and torn, Apollo is built to fill in the blanks with the most statistically likely words or passages, potentially revealing hidden details about historical events and practices.
\n\nDimitris Vlitas, partner at Sail Reply, tells WIRED that unlocking knowledge in this way “was unthinkable a year ago.”
\n\nUntil now, restoring a tattered piece of papyrus…
Original source: https://www.wired.com/