The Archaeology of the Mind Lab
PI Prof. Orly Goldwasser
The Archaeology of the Mind Lab studies how different cultures, past and present, organize knowledge about the world.
New paper: Towards automatic tagging of classifiers, using training data collected in iClassifier datasets
Nikolaev, Dmitry, Jorke Grotenhuis, Haleli Harel and Orly Goldwasser.
2024. Classifier identification in Ancient Egyptian as a low-resource sequence-labelling task. ML4AL 2024 (First Machine Learning for Ancient Languages Workshop).
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Ancient Egyptian
Sumerian
Ancient Chinese
Anatolian Hieroglyphs
Corpus-based
classifier networks
© Goldwasser/Harel/Nikolaev
Mindmapping of ancient cultures
The evolution of Egyptian hieroglyphic classifiers resembles the evolution of birds’ wings. Feathers were initially for thermal insulation and display; only later did they begin assisting with flight. Analogously, classifiers served limited functions at first—reference tracking and disambiguation—but evolved over time to serve new functions. Without feathers, birds could not have developed the ability to fly. Similarly, classifiers opened the door to complex categorization, priming the mental lexicon of the reader. Wings allow birds to fly high and survey vast landscapes; classifiers enable us to observe the landscape of the Ancient Egyptian mind.
Current research in the lab
A classifier network of Sumerian, based on the ePSD2 database.
Prof. Dr. Gebhard J. Selz. Data collected by Bo Zhang in iClassifier.
Selz, Gebhard. 2021. “Appositive semantic classification in Sumerian Cuneiform and the implementation of iClassifier.” Ash-sharq: Bulletin of the Ancient Near East 6, 142–171.
Selz, Gebhard J. and Bo Zhang. 2024. “Classification in Sumerian Cuneiform.” Special issue of the Journal of Chinese Writing Systems, Classifiers in Ancient Scripts.