Restoring Ancient Ideograph: A Multimodal Multitask Neural Network Approach

Siyu Duan, Jun Wang, Qi Su


Abstract
Cultural heritage serves as the enduring record of human thought and history. Despite significant efforts dedicated to the preservation of cultural relics, many ancient artefacts have been ravaged irreversibly by natural deterioration and human actions. Deep learning technology has emerged as a valuable tool for restoring various kinds of cultural heritages, including ancient text restoration. Previous research has approached ancient text restoration from either visual or textual perspectives, often overlooking the potential of synergizing multimodal information. This paper proposes a novel Multimodal Multitask Restoring Model (MMRM) to restore ancient texts, particularly emphasising the ideograph. This model combines context understanding with residual visual information from damaged ancient artefacts, enabling it to predict damaged characters and generate restored images simultaneously. We tested the MMRM model through experiments conducted on both simulated datasets and authentic ancient inscriptions. The results show that the proposed method gives insightful restoration suggestions in both simulation experiments and real-world scenarios. To the best of our knowledge, this work represents the pioneering application of multimodal deep learning in ancient text restoration, which will contribute to the understanding of ancient society and culture in digital humanities fields.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.1221
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
14005–14015
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.1221
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Siyu Duan, Jun Wang, and Qi Su. 2024. Restoring Ancient Ideograph: A Multimodal Multitask Neural Network Approach. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 14005–14015, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
Restoring Ancient Ideograph: A Multimodal Multitask Neural Network Approach (Duan et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.1221.pdf