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Investing.com -- Google (NASDAQ:GOOGL) has introduced Aeneas, a groundbreaking artificial intelligence model designed to help historians analyze and contextualize ancient Latin inscriptions.
The new AI tool, named after the mythological Graeco-Roman hero, builds upon Google’s earlier Ithaca model for Greek inscriptions but offers significantly enhanced capabilities. Aeneas can search for textual parallels across thousands of Latin inscriptions, process both text and images, restore gaps of unknown length in damaged texts, and predict when and where inscriptions were written.
Google co-developed Aeneas with the University of Nottingham, in partnership with researchers from the Universities of Warwick, Oxford, and Athens University of Economics and Business. The company has made an interactive version freely available at predictingthepast.com and has open-sourced the code and dataset.
The model was trained on the Latin Epigraphic Dataset, comprising over 176,000 Latin inscriptions from across the ancient Roman world. This dataset was created by cleaning and harmonizing records from established epigraphic databases including the Epigraphic Database Roma, Epigraphic Database Heidelberg (ETR:HDDG), and Epigraphic Database Clauss Slaby.
Aeneas demonstrates impressive accuracy, restoring damaged inscriptions with 73% accuracy for gaps up to ten characters and 58% accuracy when the restoration length is unknown. It can attribute inscriptions to one of 62 ancient Roman provinces with 72% accuracy and date texts within 13 years of historian-provided date ranges.
In a test case involving Emperor Augustus’ Res Gestae Divi Augusti, Aeneas produced a distribution of possible dates that captured both prevailing dating hypotheses among historians, demonstrating its ability to contribute to ongoing scholarly debates.
A study involving twenty-three historians showed that the most effective results came when experts used Aeneas’ contextual information alongside its predictions. Historians reported that the tool accelerated their work and expanded the range of relevant parallel inscriptions they could access.
As part of the release, Google is also upgrading its Ithaca model for ancient Greek to be powered by Aeneas technology, and has co-designed a teaching syllabus to bridge technical skills with historical thinking in educational settings.
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