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# Word Segmentation for Akkadian Cuneiform

**Authors:** Timo Homburg; [Christian Chiarcos](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/christian-chiarcos/) · **Year:** 2016 · **Venue:** LREC 2016, Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation **Link:** [aclanthology.org/L16-1642](https://aclanthology.org/L16-1642/) · library `lingbulk-2016-homburg-word-segmentation-akkadian-cuneiform` · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) (ELRA, LREC proceedings) — summary only

[**4** citations](https://openalex.org/works?filter=cites:W2579043414) openalex-snapshot · 2026-10-14[Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16)](https://aclanthology.org/volumes/L16-1/)[licence](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)

- [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/L16-1642/)
- [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/L16-1642.pdf)
- [DOI 10.63317/2cqjtjuzjfzy](https://doi.org/10.63317/2cqjtjuzjfzy)
- [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2579043414)

**Authors (2)**

1. [Timo Homburg](https://openalex.org/A5056967062) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9499-5840) · [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/3424209) · h 8 · 212 citations · 72 works
2. [Christian Chiarcos](https://openalex.org/A5070093758) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4428-029X) · [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/1723161) · h 22 · 1646 citations · 326 works

Citations and author metrics from openalex-snapshot (2026-10-14); authors with the same name are not always told apart.

## What it is about

The authors segment Akkadian cuneiform lines into words, treating the logosyllabic script as close to Chinese and Japanese. They compare three families of methods: rule-based (bigram, prefix/suffix, Tango), dictionary-based (MaxMatch and variants, minimum word count, maximum probability) and statistical or machine-learning classifiers (C4.5, MaxEnt, Naive Bayes, kNN, SVM, CRF, HMM, plus a meta-classifier). The data are Middle Babylonian tablets split 80:20 per tablet; Old Babylonian and Neo-Assyrian serve as further stages. The average-word-length baseline reaches a boundary F of about 43 and a word F of about 21. Dictionary methods are best (MinWCMatch: boundary F about 73, word F about 60), while most learners barely beat the baseline. Only Tango among the rule methods beats it.

## Ideas

- I1. Score the `tools/hbo` segmenter with the same triad: boundary F, word F and a window-based score (WindowDiff). Split the MACULA data per verse or per book, not per line, so no neighbouring line leaks into the test part, as the authors did per tablet.
- I2. A maximum-match segmenter over the `lex` and `pre` tables as a second deterministic baseline for unpointed text. The paper's finding that dictionary matching beats learners on a small corpus argues for the tables before any learned step.
- I3. Keep an average-length style floor in every report (here: one word per fixed number of letters), so a new mode of `tools/hbo` is always compared with something trivial.

## For Mova

I1–I3 go into `tools/hbo`, as its evaluation and its baselines for the unpointed mode. Akkadian is not a Mova language yet, so nothing goes into `languages/`.

Topics: [Akkadian and cuneiform NLP](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/topics/akkadian-cuneiform-nlp/)

## Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. [DOI 10.63317/2cqjtjuzjfzy](https://doi.org/10.63317/2cqjtjuzjfzy)

```
@inproceedings{homburg2016word,
  title = {{Word Segmentation for Akkadian Cuneiform}},
  author = {Homburg, Timo and Chiarcos, Christian},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16)},
  year = {2016},
  doi = {10.63317/2cqjtjuzjfzy},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.63317/2cqjtjuzjfzy}
}
```

- [← previous Exploiting Arabic Diacritization for High Quality Automatic Annotation](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/lingbulk-2016-habash-exploiting-arabic-diacritization-high-quality/)
- [next → Gender exponence and apparent polarity in a class of Omani Mehri plurals](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/lingbulk-2017-fathi-gender-exponence-apparent-polarity-class/)
- [↑ back to Semitic languages](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/sem/)

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