Academy of Finland grants a 4-year project funding to the ‘Semantic domains in Akkadian texts’-project

The Academy of Finland has recently announced the funding decisions for research projects and has granted the ‘Semantic Domains in Akkadian texts‘ funding for four years! Our congratulations to all the researchers involved in this exciting project!

The project is given funding from Sept. 2016 to Aug. 2020 and is directed by Krister Lindén (language technology, Doc.) and its members are Heidi Jauhiainen (Egyptology, PhD; language technology, MA) and Tommi Jauhiainen (language technology, MA), as well as CSTT member Saana Svärd (Assyriology, Doc.).

The Semantic domains in Akkadian texts-project aims at generating contextual semantic domains for Akkadian lexemes using state-of-the-art methods from language technology. For Assyriology, the project will enable cultural understanding of concepts in ancient Mesopotamia in a totally new way. For language technology, dealing with difficult remains of cuneiform texts will provide an opportunity to develop methods that are useful for the analysis of other extinct languages as well as small and fragmented corpora. The main source of Akkadian texts for the project is the Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus (Oracc), but we will make use of all relevant corpora available to us. The diachronic perspective is important as the 2500 years of written Akkadian yield significant opportunities for modeling linguistic and cultural change.

CSTT’s input is valuable in that it provides insights regarding the methodologies used in connection with the semantic domains of the Hebrew Bible.