{
  "id": 663576,
  "title": "Another Public source of data (Michel Old Assyrian Merchant Letters)",
  "url": "/competitions/deep-past-initiative-machine-translation/discussion/663576",
  "author_name": "",
  "post_date": "2025-12-18T20:59:19.407233700Z",
  "votes": 11,
  "comment_count": 2,
  "views": 0,
  "content": "<p><a href=\"https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/manwithacat/michel-old-assyrian-letters\" target=\"_blank\">https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/manwithacat/michel-old-assyrian-letters</a></p>\n<p><strong>Michel Old Assyrian Merchant Letters</strong></p>\n<p>Parallel corpus of 264 Old Assyrian merchant letters with Akkadian transliteration and English translations, extracted from Cécile Michel's scholarly publication.</p>\n<p><strong>Source</strong></p>\n<p>Cécile Michel, \"Correspondance des marchands de Kanish au début du IIe millénaire avant J.-C.\" (LAPO 19, Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 2001)</p>\n<p>This landmark publication contains French translations of Old Assyrian merchant correspondence from the ancient trading colony of Kaniš (modern Kültepe, Turkey), dating to approximately 1950-1750 BCE.</p>\n<p><strong>Relevance to Deep Past Competition</strong></p>\n<p>This dataset provides additional parallel training data for the Deep Past Initiative Machine Translation Competition. The competition's training data contains 1,561 Old Assyrian texts; this dataset adds 264 unique texts from the same period and genre. (English translations are machine generated from French)</p>",
  "messages": [
    {
      "id": "3378928",
      "postDate": "12/18/2025 20:59:19",
      "content": "<p><a href=\"https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/manwithacat/michel-old-assyrian-letters\" target=\"_blank\">https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/manwithacat/michel-old-assyrian-letters</a></p>\n<p><strong>Michel Old Assyrian Merchant Letters</strong></p>\n<p>Parallel corpus of 264 Old Assyrian merchant letters with Akkadian transliteration and English translations, extracted from Cécile Michel's scholarly publication.</p>\n<p><strong>Source</strong></p>\n<p>Cécile Michel, \"Correspondance des marchands de Kanish au début du IIe millénaire avant J.-C.\" (LAPO 19, Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 2001)</p>\n<p>This landmark publication contains French translations of Old Assyrian merchant correspondence from the ancient trading colony of Kaniš (modern Kültepe, Turkey), dating to approximately 1950-1750 BCE.</p>\n<p><strong>Relevance to Deep Past Competition</strong></p>\n<p>This dataset provides additional parallel training data for the Deep Past Initiative Machine Translation Competition. The competition's training data contains 1,561 Old Assyrian texts; this dataset adds 264 unique texts from the same period and genre. (English translations are machine generated from French)</p>",
      "rawMarkdown": "https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/manwithacat/michel-old-assyrian-letters\n\n**Michel Old Assyrian Merchant Letters**\n\nParallel corpus of 264 Old Assyrian merchant letters with Akkadian transliteration and English translations, extracted from Cécile Michel's scholarly publication.\n\n**Source**\n\nCécile Michel, \"Correspondance des marchands de Kanish au début du IIe millénaire avant J.-C.\" (LAPO 19, Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 2001)\n\nThis landmark publication contains French translations of Old Assyrian merchant correspondence from the ancient trading colony of Kaniš (modern Kültepe, Turkey), dating to approximately 1950-1750 BCE.\n\n**Relevance to Deep Past Competition**\n\nThis dataset provides additional parallel training data for the Deep Past Initiative Machine Translation Competition. The competition's training data contains 1,561 Old Assyrian texts; this dataset adds 264 unique texts from the same period and genre. (English translations are machine generated from French)",
      "votes": null
    },
    {
      "id": "3386331",
      "postDate": "01/05/2026 04:57:22",
      "content": "<p>Has this dataset improved your model? I'm still just using the train.csv. Any attempts for me to use external data or even sentence alignment has led to worse performance 🥲</p>",
      "rawMarkdown": "Has this dataset improved your model? I'm still just using the train.csv. Any attempts for me to use external data or even sentence alignment has led to worse performance 🥲",
      "votes": null
    },
    {
      "id": "3386485",
      "postDate": "01/05/2026 11:08:07",
      "content": "<p>Yup. Same experience here.</p>",
      "rawMarkdown": "Yup. Same experience here.",
      "votes": null
    }
  ],
  "comments": [
    {
      "id": 3386331,
      "author_name": "jackvd",
      "author_url": "",
      "post_date": "01/05/2026 04:57:22",
      "content": "<p>Has this dataset improved your model? I'm still just using the train.csv. Any attempts for me to use external data or even sentence alignment has led to worse performance 🥲</p>",
      "votes": null,
      "replies": [
        {
          "id": 3386485,
          "author_name": "manwithacat",
          "author_url": "",
          "post_date": "01/05/2026 11:08:07",
          "content": "<p>Yup. Same experience here.</p>",
          "votes": null,
          "replies": []
        }
      ]
    }
  ],
  "raw_markdown_by_id": {
    "3378928": "https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/manwithacat/michel-old-assyrian-letters\n\n**Michel Old Assyrian Merchant Letters**\n\nParallel corpus of 264 Old Assyrian merchant letters with Akkadian transliteration and English translations, extracted from Cécile Michel's scholarly publication.\n\n**Source**\n\nCécile Michel, \"Correspondance des marchands de Kanish au début du IIe millénaire avant J.-C.\" (LAPO 19, Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 2001)\n\nThis landmark publication contains French translations of Old Assyrian merchant correspondence from the ancient trading colony of Kaniš (modern Kültepe, Turkey), dating to approximately 1950-1750 BCE.\n\n**Relevance to Deep Past Competition**\n\nThis dataset provides additional parallel training data for the Deep Past Initiative Machine Translation Competition. The competition's training data contains 1,561 Old Assyrian texts; this dataset adds 264 unique texts from the same period and genre. (English translations are machine generated from French)",
    "3386331": "Has this dataset improved your model? I'm still just using the train.csv. Any attempts for me to use external data or even sentence alignment has led to worse performance 🥲",
    "3386485": "Yup. Same experience here."
  },
  "source": "meta"
}