Formal Machine Interpretation for the Semasiographic Mixtec Codices of Precolonial and Early Colonial Mesoamerica

Christopher Driggers-Ellis, Gabriel Ayoubi, Girish Salunke, Christan Grant

Keywords: parsing and related tasks, document representation, cross-modal content generation, historical NLP, Mixtec

TL;DR: We introduce a formal machine interpretation pipeline for the Mixtec codices of precolonial and early colonial Mesoamerica and other semasiographic media and provide an overview of current work on implementing it.

Abstract:

The precolonial and early colonial Mixtec codices describe the history and stories of the region in a semasiographic medium that is full of symbolic representations and meant to be narrated.
Recently, the community has introduced datasets of XML representations of related media, including Aztec codices and Mayan hieroglyphic script, in a step towards symbolic machine interpretation of these historic Mesoamerican artifacts.
In this work, we propose formal symbolic machine interpretation of XML encodings representing facsimile images from the Mixtec Codex Zouche-Nuttal.
We demonstrate the efficacy of symbolic machine interpretation from XML step-by-step, showing how our parser and interpreter process text capturing a scene from the Mixtec Codex Zouche-Nuttall.
We hope our contribution and the example we provide motivate collaboration among the archaeological, historical, linguistic, and natural language processing research communities to apply machine interpretation to Mixtec codices and similar manuscripts.

Submission Number: 33