Explainable dating of greek papyri images

Abstract Greek literary papyri, which are unique witnesses of antique literature, do not usually bear a date. They are thus currently dated based on palaeographical methods, with broad approximations which often span more than a century. We created a dataset of 242 images of papyri written in “bookhand” scripts whose date can be securely assigned, and we used it to train algorithms for the task of dating, showing its challenging nature. To address data scarcity, we extended our dataset by segmenting each image into its respective text lines. By using the line-based version of our dataset, we trained a Convolutional Neural Network, equipped with a fragmentation-based augmentation strategy, and we achieved a mean absolute error of 54 years. The results improve further when the task is cast as a multi-class classification problem, predicting the century. Using our network, we computed precise date estimations for papyri whose date is disputed or vaguely defined, employing explainability to understand dating-driving features.