August 23, 2024

On August 14th, various awards for the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) were announced,with7 papers receivingthe Best PaperAward.One of theseven awardedpapers,titled “Deciphering Oracle Bone Language with Diffusion Models,”isco-authored by Huazhong University of Science and Technology, the University of Adelaide, Anyang Normal University, and South China University of Technology, received the award. Thefirst author of the paper is anundergraduate student from the School of Future Technology,Guan Haisu,who had received guidance fromProf.Bai Xiang and his research team.

This research utilized image-based generative models to train a conditional diffusion-basedmodel optimized for the deciphering of oracle bone script, named Oracle Bone Script Decipher (OBSD).OBSDuses unseen categories of oracle bone script as conditional inputs to generate corresponding modern Chinese character images,thusproviding an innovative approach torecognizeancient script in natural language processing. Thisnew approacheffectivelyaddresses the lackof comprehensive corpora for oracle bone scripts,and offers important deciphering cluesby adoptingimage generationtechniques.Furthermore,itcan be easily extended toidentify other ancient texts and decipherother pictographicorideographic scripts.

ACL is a top-ranked international conference in computational linguistics and natural language processing. Organized by the International Association for Computational Linguistics, ACLannualmeeting is classified as an A-level conference and recommended by the China Computer Federation (CCF).