August 30, 2025
Google reveals KI, which decrypted the lack of Latin words in old Roman inscriptions

Google reveals KI, which decrypted the lack of Latin words in old Roman inscriptions

Google’s Deepmind has presented a new tool for artificial intelligence that is able to decipher and contextualize old texts, including Latin inscriptions from the Roman era.

The new AI called Aeneas could be a transformative instrument that historians can use to expand our understanding of the past, said the Tech giant on Thursday.

A study published in the journal Nature showed that Aeneas could predict missing parts of Latin inscriptions from the ancient Roman period.

Although writing in the Roman world was common, texts that were recovered by historians from the period are often fragmentary, weathered or unrecognizable.

The restoration and dating of these texts is almost impossible without contextual information, and therefore historians try to identify “parallels” – which are texts with similarities in formulations, syntax, standardized formulas or origin.

Google Deepminds Aeneas Ki decodes context in ancient Roman Latin texts (Robbe Wulgaert)Google Deepminds Aeneas Ki decodes context in ancient Roman Latin texts (Robbe Wulgaert)

Google Deepminds Aeneas Ki decodes context in ancient Roman Latin texts (Robbe Wulgaert)

Aeneas can accelerate this contextualization process and predict a missing text, even if the length is uncertain, explain researchers.

“In thousands of Latin inscriptions, it justifies the textual and context -related parallels in seconds that enable historians to interpret and build up the results of the model,” said Deepmind in a explanation.

“Aeneas sets a new most modern benchmark for the restoration of damaged texts and predicts when and where they were written,” said the AI company and added that the tool was also developed to take visual images in its considerations.

In the new study, scientists and historians started a collaborative study on the evaluation of inscriptions from the 7th century to the eighth century AD.

Historians found that the context proposals provided by Aeneas were useful in 90 percent of cases and improved their trust in important tasks by 44 percent.

When historians worked with the AI model, they were able to see better results in recovery and geographical attribution tasks than when Aeneas or the scholars worked alone.

The study showed that the AI could date events within a period of 13 years.

The researchers hope that the AI model can also be adapted to other old languages in order to deciphered scripts from Papyri to the coin, expand its skills and to draw connections via a wider spectrum of historical evidence.

Aeneas works by taking the text and image of an inscription as input.

Scientists have trained the AI model with a “large and reliable data set”, which comes from decades of work by historians to create digital collections, including EDR, – a sought -after resource that provides texts, bibliographical information and descriptive data for Latin American and Greek inscriptions from old Italy.

The researchers organized these collections in a more accessible data set of over 176,000 Latin inscriptions from all over the old Roman world.

After processing the text image of an inscription, the AI model is based on some of its special internal networks to restore signs and date the text, while the geographical assignment also uses images of the inscriptions as input.

Aeneas then contextualizes the text by calling up a list of parallels and creating a “kind of historical fingerprint” of what the text says, when and where it came from and how it refers to other inscriptions, the researchers explained.

Scientists found that the AI was able to restore inscriptions with an accuracy of 73 percent in gaps of up to ten characters.

When Aeneas rated one of the most famous Roman inscriptions: the Res Gestae Divi Augusti – Kaiser Augustus’ extinction report on his successes forecast two possible data, one at about 10-1 BC.

“These results are supported by the results of an extensive historian -ai evaluation in which historians have confirmed that Aeneas seamlessly integrates into research workflows and offer a transformative help for historical studies,” wrote the researchers.

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