Mapping Chinese Oracle-bone Glyphs to Simplified Glyphs with Generative Adversarial Networks

Abstract

Evolved from more than 6,000 years ago, Chinese language has a long history. Its glyphs experienced seven major transformations in chronological order: oracle-bone script, bronze script, seal script, clerical script, cursive script, regular script and simplified script. As the earliest Chinese script, many oracle-bone glyphs still remain undecoded. In this paper, we use two types of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), Pix2Pix and CycleGAN to map oracle-bone glyphs to simplified glyphs directly. The research results can be used to help decode undecoded oracle-bone glyphs, find the relationships between these scripts, and enrich Chinese language, history and culture education.