Chinese university team uses AI technology to decipher oracle bone inscriptions

On December 4, 2024, Xiamen University officially announced that the school team is trying to use artificial intelligence (AI) multimodal large models, combined with the sound, shape, meaning and other multi-faceted information of oracle bone inscriptions, to assist experts in more efficient oracle bone inscription deciphering.

Oracle bone inscriptions, also known as "Yinxu characters", have a history of more than 3,000 years. They are one of the four major ancient characters in the world and the root of modern Chinese characters. Traditional oracle bone inscription research is extremely time-consuming and laborious. It relies on experts to conduct manual interpretation, and mostly uses methods such as character shape analysis and example research. It requires archaeological experts to decipher oracle bone characters based on deep knowledge accumulation and a large amount of literature reading, combined with various knowledge, which is no longer sustainable.

In recent years, AI technology has developed rapidly. The Xiamen University team uses the super semantic representation ability of deep learning models to realize the auxiliary research and interpretation of oracle bone inscriptions. In response to the current situation of scarce oracle bone script data and uneven image quality, the team of researchers systematically organized the relevant ancient character data, constructed a larger-scale, higher-quality multimodal dataset of oracle bone scripts, and proposed a technical solution of "multi-information assisted interpretation model based on the large multimodal model of oracle bone scripts."