# Language and Dialect Identification of Cuneiform Texts

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1903.01891 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.01891/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 5 Mar 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Filling the Gaps in Ancient Akkadian Texts: A Masked Language Modelling Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.04513/) (2021)
- [Multilingual Language Models Encode Script Over Linguistic Structure](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.05090/) (2026)
- [Signs of the Past, Patterns of the Present: On the Automatic Classification of Old Babylonian Cuneiform Signs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.13959/) (2025)
- [SumTablets: A Transliteration Dataset of Sumerian Tablets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.22200/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This article introduces a corpus of cuneiform texts from which the dataset for the use of the Cuneiform Language Identification (CLI) 2019 shared task was derived as well as some preliminary language identification experiments conducted using that corpus. We also describe the CLI dataset and how it was derived from the corpus. In addition, we provide some baseline language identification results using the CLI dataset. To the best of our knowledge, the experiments detailed here are the first time automatic language identification methods have been used on cuneiform data.