Pythia[1][2] is an ancient text restoration model that recovers missing characters from a damaged text input using deep neural networks.
It was created by Yannis Assael, Thea Sommerschield, and Jonathan Prag, researchers from Google DeepMind and the University of Oxford.
Hundreds of thousands of these texts, known as inscriptions, have survived to our day, but are often damaged over the centuries.
Pythia takes as input the damaged text, and is trained to return hypothesised restorations of ancient Greek inscriptions, working as an assistive aid for ancient historians.
Its neural network architecture works at both the character- and word-level, thereby effectively handling long-term context information, and dealing efficiently with incomplete word representations.