Dated back in the Shang dynasty, the oracle bone script is the oldest form of Chinese language engraved on animal bones. A large body of the characters and writings still remains mysterious and awaits to be deciphered. Understanding the language and the actual meaning of the inscriptions will uncover the history thousands of years ago and reveal the mystery for the Chinese civilization. Project Diviner aims to bring computational models and AI tools to assist the historian to solve this grand challenge.

Oracle Bone Script Restoration and Curation 

The first goal of project is to restore the ancient script to its most original and complete form. This will lay the foundation for all further studies. Due to historical reasons, the oracle bones are heavily fragmented with lots of duplicated rubbings. We are going to develop state-of-the-art tools based on image processing and visual understanding to recover the information engraved on the bones.

We have started the exploration of the first goal by thoroughly comparing 181,134 pieces of inscription rubbings and assisted oracle bones experts in finding a large number of new duplicate copies across more than 100 databases of oracle bone scripts. The research findings has been published on the website of the Pre Qin History Research Office of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences: https://www.xianqin.org/blog/archives/17264.html (opens in new tab).

Oracle Bone Script Translation

The second goal of the project is to translate oracle bone script into modern Chinese in a sentence level manner. This will be extremely challenging as the total amount of the available corpus is limited, and the known ones are even less. Researchers will need to take account of all possible cues beyond the text itself for translation. Translating the oracle bone script will uncover the history thousands of years ago.

Oracle Bone Character Decipher

The third goal of the project is to decipher individual characters and connect the dots through the evolution of the ancient characters to modern Chinese. This will also help to understand the grammar, and identify the pronunciation of the oracle bone script. This marks the grand challenge of the project.