TabletCraft: Bridging a 4,000-Year Cultural Gap with Bidirectional Akkadian NMT and Cuneiform Rendering

“Half a million cuneiform clay tablets survive in museums worldwide, yet modern users can neither read nor write in the world's oldest writing system, leaving a 4,000-year cultural barrier that existing NLP tools have only partially addressed.”

“We present TabletCraft, the first open-source system that enables bidirectional interaction with Mesopotamian writing.”

“On the held-out Akkademia validation split (2,812 samples), we report 49.1 BLEU for Akkadian-to-English and 48.5 BLEU for English-to-Akkadian, the first published quantitative result in the reverse direction.”