Recent rain may not be enough to halt the shrinking of Canada's cattle herd

Amanda Stephenson, The Canadian Press

Anxious Alberta ranchers praying for rain got their wish this week, but it may not be enough to stop the ongoing decline in Canadian cattle production.

The moisture that fell on parts of drought-parched Alberta came as a welcome reprieve to the hundreds of cattle farmers who have seen their pastures wither and their water supplies dry up this June.

But a few inches of rain won't be enough to cut it in much of Canadian cattle country, which is still trying to dig its way out of a significant moisture deficit.

"I think this is the driest I’ve ever seen it," said Bob Lowe, a rancher and feedlot operator from the Nanton area of southern Alberta.

"The grass started this spring, and came up a little bit, and then it just turned around and died. It’s supposed to be green this time of year, but it's just grey-brown."

According to Agriculture Canada's Drought Monitor, 82 per cent of the agricultural regions of the three prairie provinces were either "abnormally dry" or in "moderate to extreme drought" as of the end of May.

Some ranchers have been spending hours every day this spring hauling water by truck or trailer to their cattle after their watering holes completely dried up, said Ryder Lee, general manager of the Canadian Cattle Association.

"Or they're filling dugouts from other places with pipelines and pumps," Lee said.

"There's lots of creativity and ingenuity in the industry, but all of that takes a toll on people."

It also takes a toll on an industry that has already been steadily shrinking for years. Last year, the size of the Canadian cattle herd fell to 12.3 million animals — the lowest level recorded since July 1, 1988.

The 2.8 per cent year-over-year reduction was in large part due to the after-effects of an extremely harsh drought on the prairies in 2021. As crops withered and feed prices skyrocketed, many ranchers sold their cattle for slaughter rather than holding onto them for breeding.

That could happen again this year, and at an even larger scale, said Rob Somerville, who has a cattle farm in east-central Alberta, near the town of Innisfail.

"There is a train of thought that people who may have hung on last time, this time, will sell," Somerville said.

He added that some producers might have hesitated to sell in 2021 because cattle prices at the time were low. But as cattle numbers in North America have continued to shrink, prices have increased, hitting all-time records this spring.

"Just about everybody I've spoken to has already prepared a list of the cows they're going to sell. These people won't be leaving the industry, but they're certainly planning a herd reduction."

South of the border, U.S. cattle inventory is also down four per cent year-over-year due to increased heifer slaughter. According to a report by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, roughly 69 per cent of the U.S. cattle herd as of December 2022 was located in drought-stricken areas, leading to the largest contraction of the North American cattle herd in a decade.

Other catastrophes in the last two decades — including the BSE (mad cow) crisis and the 2009 financial crisis — also led ranchers to downsize their herds or exit the industry entirely.

As a result, according to Statistics Canada, there are 25 per cent fewer beef cows in Canada now than there were in 2005.

 "After a while it's not just an individual farm-by-farm thing, it's an industry issue. And that has far wider implications," Somerville said, adding that fewer cows could cause ripple effects all the way down the value chain — potentially leading to lost jobs at feedlots, at meat-packing plants and more.

"This is a big contributor to the economy that we're talking about."

Winnipeg-based cattle markets analyst Jerry Klassen said he believes one or two good rains could save the industry from wide-spread liquidation of herds this year.

"You can still get one good hay crop in Alberta if you get timely rains from now moving forward," Klassen said.

"And you've got these high prices. If the farmer can maintain or increase his herd, he's going to reap the rewards over the next two or three years."

But Somerville said multiple years of dry conditions have left some ranchers feeling that they're "running out of tricks they can pull out of the hat."

"There's a lot of producers who have been hanging on as long as they can and they may decide now is the time to get out of the industry," he said.

"It's just been too many struggles, for too long."

This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 16, 2023.

WORKERS CAPITAL

Luxury Banff resort bought by Ontario pension for US$128M

Ari Altstedter, The Canadian Press

One of Canada’s biggest pension funds bought a luxury resort in the Rocky Mountains as tourism’s recovery continues to defy predictions of an economic slowdown.

Oxford Properties, the real estate arm of the pension representing municipal workers in Ontario, has purchased the Rimrock Resort Hotel in Canada’s Banff National Park, according to a statement seen by Bloomberg News.

The firm is paying $170 million (US$128 million) for the property, said a person familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified citing private information. An Oxford spokesperson declined to comment on the price.

After grinding to a near halt during the COVID-19 pandemic, global tourism has rebounded as consumers prove eager to spend savings on long-delayed experiences and travel. That pent-up demand has so far helped many owners weather historic increases in interest rates over the past year by central banks trying to tamp down inflation. 

Many forecasters had expected the surge in borrowing costs to throw the global economy into a recession, and some still see that as a possibility as signs emerge that growth may be starting to slow.  

“We’re a longer-term investor,” Tyler MacDonald, Oxford’s head of hotels, said in a phone interview on the timing of the Rimrock purchase. “If you look at global travel, it has grown consistently for almost 75 years and we just believe deeply that’s going to continue.”

Built on a site that has hosted visitors to the nearby hot springs since 1895, Rimrock is perched on the tree-lined slopes of Sulphur Mountain in Banff, about a 90-minute drive west of Calgary. The park is one of Canada’s main tourist destinations, known for world-class skiing and snowboarding in winter as well as golf, hiking and cycling in the warmer months, with views of snow-covered peaks and pristine mountain lakes year-round.

Oxford said it plans to spend as much as $100 million renovating the resort, which will be operated by French hospitality group Accor SA. 

“We have high conviction in this particular lodging market, which is Banff,” said MacDonald. “It has extremely high barriers to entry, it doesn’t have many significant properties, and this one just happened to come availab

Temporary foreign workers need more paths to immigration, experts say

Rosa Saba, The Canadian Press

Jun 16, 2023

As hotel and restaurant owners increasingly turn to temporary foreign workers to fill labour gaps, there are growing calls to give those workers more paths to permanent residency.

“If there are particular occupations where there's a real need and we’ve become dependent on temporary foreign workers ... we should include them in a permanent system,” said Naomi Alboim, a senior policy fellow at Toronto Metropolitan University.

While the COVID-19 pandemic has worsened the labour picture for the accommodation and food service industry, the use of temporary foreign workers in the sector has been rising for years. According to Statistics Canada, their share of the workforce more than doubled from 4.4 per cent in 2010 to 10.9 per cent in 2020.

That share is expected to keep rising as companies struggle to fill tens of thousands of jobs amid record low unemployment, pandemic-accelerated early retirements and workers leaving for other sectors, said Adrienne Foster, vice-president of policy and public affairs for the Hotel Association of Canada.

Around 90 per cent of the association’s member employers have increased wages to try and attract more workers domestically, and many have increased benefits, development opportunities and other perks, but they’re still struggling to attract applicants, she said.

“COVID did kind of precipitate a decreased appetite for those types of jobs,” said Foster.

“I think at the end of the day … the demographics of the Canadian workforce mean that we have to work internationally,” she said.

To address these gaps, the federal government rolled out temporary measures in April 2022, allowing employers in the accommodation and food service sector, among other sectors facing labour shortages, to hire up to 30 per cent of their workforce through the Temporary Foreign Worker program for low-wage positions. The temporary measures were extended in March 2023 until the end of October. 

But as use of the TFW program becomes more common, so is criticism of what some call an over-reliance on temporary foreign workers, with concerns about the risks these workers may face. 

Temporary foreign worker permits are usually tied to the employer that brought them into the country, making workers reluctant to report abuses, said Derek Johnstone, special assistant to the national president of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union.

“It puts the entire onus on the migrant,” said Johnstone, though he said the union has had some success in helping workers demonstrate employer abuse and get open work permits as a result. 

Alboim said a dependence on temporary foreign workers can also disincentivize employers from increasing wages and benefits, improving working conditions, and even automating more. 

At the same time as the government opens the door to more temporary foreign labour, it’s also ramping up immigration, mainly in higher-skilled sectors, said Alboim, a former Ontario Deputy Minister of Immigration. And because many temporary foreign workers are entering the country for what are considered lower-skilled jobs, they have fewer opportunities to transition to permanent residency, she said. 

“We have developed, in my view, a really bifurcated system,” she said. “High-skilled, permanent. Low-skilled, temporary. And I don’t think that’s healthy for the economy, and I don’t think that’s healthy for the country.”

Recent changes to the selection system for economic immigrants include a few more occupations from categories considered lower-skill, which is a good start, she said.

The restaurant sector needs to increase hiring of domestic workers and hiring through immigration, while also having the option of temporary foreign workers to fill in gaps or seasonal demand, said Olivier Bourbeau, vice-president of federal affairs with industry group Restaurants Canada.

“We don’t only need temporary foreign workers, we need a real immigration strategy,” he said. 

The current system is two-tiered, Bourbeau agreed, saying he’d like to see changes made to create more mobility for temporary workers within companies and in the industry to potentially help them become eligible for permanent residency. 

Foster at the Hotels Association is also supportive of more paths to permanent residency for temporary foreign workers in the hospitality sector, such as through the Express Entry program. 

“I think the biggest challenge we have right now with our immigration system is that it really favours education,” she said. “There's a huge mismatch between the people who are coming in and the job vacancies that are available.” 

Instead of the current patchwork of difficult-to-navigate federal and provincial programs and pilots, the federal economic immigration system should be expanded to include these workers, who are filling ongoing labour market needs, said Alboim. 

“If the temporary workers coming in are truly doing temporary work ... we need that flexibility in our system,” she said. “But to fill ongoing jobs? I think it’s unconscionable.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 16, 2023.

Live Nation and SeatGeek say you'll see true costs up front

The Associated Press

U.S. President Joe Biden highlighted progress in chipping away at hidden junk fees tacked on to ticket, lodging and other prices as a “win for consumers” as major company executives meeting with him at the White House announced they'll start showing customers the real cost up front.

Live Nation, which is based in Beverly Hills, California, said Thursday that it will provide customers with upfront all-in pricing — meaning the actual purchase price including service charges and any other fees — for its owned venues by September and that Ticketmaster will give consumers the option to view all-in pricing up front for other venues on the live-entertainment tickets platform. SeatGeek, based in New York, will unveil features to make it easier to browse for tickets with the true cost displayed.

Biden, who met with those and other companies that have taken steps to embrace more transparency, including Airbnb, prioritized the effort to combat surprise or undisclosed fees in his State of the Union address and has called for legislation, regulation and private sector action to end them. The Democratic president, at Thursday's event, praised actions by companies that have eliminated or plan to eliminate those surprise fees.

The consumer advocacy push is part of Biden's pitch to voters in his 2024 reelection bid that government can help improve their lives in big and small ways.

Besides the moves by Live Nation and SeatGeek, San Francisco-based Airbnb rolled out its all-in pricing tool in December, after Biden first called on companies to stop hiding fees.

“These are just the latest private sector leaders who are responding to my call to action," Biden said, saying junk fees "can add hundreds of dollars a month and make it harder for families to pay their bills.”

“I’m asking their competitors to follow suit and adopt an all-in pricing as well," Biden said. “These actions matter and it’s inspiring companies to change their practices."

National Economic Council director Lael Brainard said in a statement that the president “has been working to lower costs for hardworking families by bringing down inflation, capping insulin prices for seniors, and eliminating hidden junk fees.”

"More companies are heeding the President’s call so that Americans know what they’re paying for up front and can save money as a result,” Brainard said.

TC Energy restarts Alberta compressor stations after wildfire-related shutdown

Holly McKenzie-Sutter, BNN Bloomberg

TC Energy has restarted compressor stations that were shut down this week due to wildfires in Alberta, and is ramping up other affected gas operations.

The company said Friday that employees and families who were evacuated from the Edson, Alta., area on June 9 are returning home. It said operations are now starting up again at the affected compressor stations on its NOVA Gas Transmission Ltd. (NGTL) System.

“As part of the return to the Edson area, we have been able to complete the safe and controlled restart of compressor units at all locations that were shut down due to wildfire precautions,” the company said in a written statement.

“Plans will be developed for a safe return to service of our gas storage facility over the coming days.”

The company said it is continuing to support wildfire response in the region and working with local authorities on the matter.

The 24,631-kilometre NOVA pipeline system connects most of western Canada’s natural gas to market, according to the company’s website.

TC Energy had previously shut down three compressor stations in May as a precaution due to the wildfires raging in Alberta.

Will wildfires have an impact on Canada's lumber industry?

Iva Poshnjari, BNN Bloomberg

Jun 14, 2023

Canada is battling numerous wildfires that are burning down a considerable amount of forests, which experts say will inevitably hurt the country’s lumber industry. 

Parts of Quebec and Alberta have been engulfed in wildfires that have caused evacuations and temporary shutdowns of natural resource infrastructure. Though the extent of the damage has not yet been determined, the impact will weigh on Canada’s lumber production, timber analyst John Duncanson of Corton Capital, told BNN Bloomberg in an interview on Wednesday.

“These fires are pretty serious. Forest area wise, we’re seeing the fires burn 15 times more than the 10-year average and we’re not even in fire season,” he said.

Duncanson added that lumber producers are powerless over these fires that put their resources at risk.

“The Canadian lumber industry is already suffering from a supply issue. Timber has been impacted by disease and manmade policies that already put pressure on available supply. These wildfires will only make this worse,” he added.

The producers are also unable to stock up supply as a future coping mechanism to wildfires as there are annual lumber cut limits in place, Duncanson explained.

He believes these pressures on supply will ultimately drive lumber prices higher.

One lumber producer operating mainly in Quebec said they’ve been forced to suspend operations amid the fires, which are the worst they’ve seen in decades, he told BNN Bloomberg.

“We’ve had to shut down sawmills in Quebec as some areas have been evacuated and our employees physically cannot be there to operate the machinery. It’s the worst I’ve seen in 30 years,” Louis Bouchard, director of public affairs and government relations at Resolute Forest Products, told BNN Bloomberg on Wednesday.

Quebec is the second-largest producer of lumber in Canada and responsible for 20.1 per cent of national softwood production. It follows British Columbia as the top provincial lumber producer.    

He agrees that the situation calls for political intervention when it comes to how Canadian forests are managed to help alleviate the issues.

“We need to change the way we manage, harvest and create biodiversity in our forests in order to help protect them from future forest fires,” he said.

Bouchard added that the government will also need to clear producers back into forest-burned areas as quickly as possible so they can recuperate any wood that may be salvaged.

Forest fires are just an addition to the already existing challenges that the lumber industry faces, one expert explained.

“Any sort of fire activity adds incremental strain on Canada’s lumber industry,” John Cooney, equity research analyst at ERA Forest Products Research, told BNN Bloomberg on Wednesday.

Wildfires, among other factors, will result in a continued downsizing of the industry, he added.

“Unfortunately, we’re looking at death by a thousand paper cuts for the lumber sector,” Cooney said.

Wildfires force some forestry companies to pause operations: Industry association

Rosa Saba, The Canadian Press

Jun 13, 2023

Wildfires across Canada are forcing some forestry companies to pause operations, particularly in Quebec. 

Close to five million hectares have been burned so far, and workers in some forestry communities have been evacuated, said Derek Nighbor, president and CEO of the Forest Products Association of Canada. 

"The impact is significant," he said, adding, "it's really varying across the country." 

Some mills and woodlands operations across the country are unable to operate right now for safety reasons, he said.

One of the companies forced to suspend operations is Montreal-headquartered Resolute Forest Products Inc. 

"For Resolute, we are particularly impacted by the boreal forest devastation in Quebec, where 2023 is already shaping up the be the worst year in over three decades in terms of the extent of area affected," spokesman Seth Kursman said in an email. 

"Although wildfire is a natural part of forest regeneration, the unseasonal heat and lack of rain has prompted many fires to erupt at the same time, making them very difficult to manage."

Kursman said the company last week suspended all woodlands operations across Quebec, and suspended operations at its Senneterre and Comtois sawmills in the Abitibi and Nord-du-Québec regions. The company also suspended operations at the Girardville and La Doré wood products facilities in Lac-Saint-Jean as well as the Outardes sawmill in the Côte-Nord region, but was able to restart the Outardes operations shortly after suspending them thanks to cooler temperatures and rain. 

Quebec has so far seen the biggest impact in recent weeks when it comes to forestry companies' operations being affected by wildfires, said Nighbor. The association is also particularly concerned about the fire outside Edson, Alta., he said. 

Lumber prices are also rising as the fires continue, with lumber futures for July up 6.8 per cent Tuesday evening compared with a week earlier. 

In a note last week, RBC Capital Markets analysts Paul Quinn and Matthew McKellar said forest fires can contribute to higher lumber prices, likely due to either constrained supply or the fear of constrained supply leading to buyers increasing inventories. The analysts noted at the time that lumber futures had ticked higher, attributing that to the current fires, and also noted that significant fires can affect longer-term timber supply. 

Nighbor said that even once the fires are under control, it won't be business as usual for companies that have paused operations, as they have to assess the impact of the fires on supply. 

"The next question is, what forests have been impacted? And how bad have they been impacted?" he said. "We'll then be able to assess the impact on timber supply, and what needs to be done to either salvage or get some of the dying or dead or decayed stuff out of the bush so it doesn't become kindling for the next fire season."

Resolute's infrastructure appears to be intact so far, said Kursman, but the company expects that some of its woodlands contractor partners will have lost critical equipment. 

The company is in the process of planning the harvest of burned trees as soon as the province gives Resolute the green light to resume woodlands operations, said Kursman. 

"This must be done as quickly as possible before insects infest and further degrade the trees," he said. 

This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 13, 2023.

 

Andrew Iacobucci named new RONA Inc. CEO one day after company announces job cuts

The Canadian Press

A Rona store is seen in St. Eustache, Que., Nov. 5, 2018. RONA Inc. says Andrew Iacobucci is taking the helm as the company's new CEO. , THE CANADIAN PRESS/Ryan Remiorz

RONA Inc. says Andrew Iacobucci is taking the helm as the company's new CEO.

The announcement comes one day after the retailer announced it was eliminating 500 jobs across the country, saying it needed to adapt to reflect new market realities amid a slowing economy.

The Boucherville, Que.-based home improvement retailer says in a press release that Iacobucci brings almost 30 years of experience to the role, most recently as executive vice-president and chief commercial officer at distribution company US Foods.

Iacobucci also previously worked at Loblaw Co. Ltd.

RONA says Iacobucci will reside in the Boucherville area to work at the company's head office.

It says interim CEO Garry Senecal will stay with the company until the end of the year to ensure a smooth transition.

The company says while Iacobucci learned French during his studies, by the time his nomination comes into effect in July, he will have completed a four-week French immersion program with a language school in Quebec City.

In November, Lowe's announced it was selling its Canadian retail business, including RONA, to New York-based private equity firm Sycamore Partners.

The retailer says it operates or services around 425 corporate and affiliated stores under different banners across the country. It says it has 22,000 employees.

RONA INC. GETTING RID OF 500 JOBS

ACROSS CANADA, CITING 'NEW MARKET

REALITIES'

The Canadian Press

Jun 15, 2023

RONA Inc. says it's eliminating 500 jobs across Canada in a bid to simplify its organizational structure.

The Boucherville, Que.-based home improvement retailer says in a press release Thursday evening that it needed to adapt to reflect new market realities amid a slowing economy. 

The Canadian economy has been showing some signs of weakness amid higher interest rates as the central bank seeks to quell inflation. 

However, GDP grew at an annualized rate of 3.1 per cent in the first quarter, beating expectations. 

The Canadian consumer has proven resilient amid tightening conditions, with household spending helping to buoy the economy's growth in the first quarter. 

In November, Lowe's announced it was selling its Canadian retail business, including RONA, to New York-based private equity firm Sycamore Partners.  

RONA says it operates or services around 425 corporate and affiliated stores under different banners across the country. It says it has 22,000 employees. 

The company says decisions like these are never taken lightly, and it will support affected employees throughout the transition. 

Groundbreaking AI project translates 5,000-year-old cuneiform at push of a button

‘Google Translate’-like program for Akkadian cuneiform will enable tens of thousands of digitized but unread tablets to be translated to English. 

Accuracy is debatable

By MELANIE LIDMAN

Today, 


A selection of Akkadian cuneiform translated with AI. (courtesy, Gai Gutherz)

Tablet Inscribed with a Fragment of the Babylonian Flood Story Epic of Atrahasis in Akkadian, Mesopotamia, First Dynasty of Babylon, reign of King Ammi-saduqa (ca. 1646–1626 BCE) (The Morgan Library & Museum)

Reverse side of Neo-Babylonian cuneiform tablet YBC 3831 with upper broken section. (Courtesy of the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, the Yale Babylonian Collection/Photography: Klaus Wagensonner)

Cuneiform tablets that were falsely labeled as product samples and shipped to Hobby Lobby Stores. (US Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of New York)

This undated photo provided by the Bible Lands Museum Jerusalem shows tablets containing cuneiform writing, one of the world's earliest scripts, on display in Jerusalem. (AP Photo/Avi Noam, Bible Lands Museum)

Cuneiform is the oldest known form of writing, but it is so difficult to read that only a few hundred experts around the world can decode the clay tablets filled with wedge-shaped symbols. Now, a team of archaeologists and computer scientists from Israel has created an AI-powered translation program for ancient Akkadian cuneiform, allowing tens of thousands of already digitized tablets to be translated into English instantaneously.

Globally, libraries, museums, and universities have more than half a million clay tablets inscribed with cuneiform. But the sheer number of texts, and the tiny number of Akkadian readers — a language no one has spoken or written for 2,000 years — means just a small fraction of these tablets have been translated.

A new Google Translate-type program may allow armchair archaeologists to try their hand at cuneiform interpretation.

“What’s so amazing about it is that I don’t need to understand Akkadian at all to translate [a tablet] and get what’s behind the cuneiform,” said Gai Gutherz, a computer scientist who was part of the team that developed the program. “I can just use the algorithm to understand and discover what the past has to say.”

The project began as a thesis project for Gutherz’s masters degree at Tel Aviv University. In May, the team published a research paper in the peer-reviewed PNAS Nexus, from the Oxford University Press, describing its neural machine translation from Akkadian to English.
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Neural machine translation, also used by Google Translate, Baidu translate, and other translation engines, works by converting words into a string of numbers, and uses a complex mathematical formula, called a neural network, to output a sentence in another language in a more accurate and natural sentence construction than translating word-for-word.

This undated photo provided by the Bible Lands Museum shows tablets with cuneiform writing, one of the world’s earliest scripts, on display in Jerusalem. (AP Photo/Avi Noam, Bible Lands Museum)

Akkadian was written and spoken in Mesopotamia and the Middle East from around 3,000 BCE to 100 CE. It was the lingua franca of the time, allowing people from different regions to communicate. The language split into Assyrian Akkadian, and Babylonian Akkadian around the year 2000 BCE. Starting around 600 BCE, Aramaic slowly began to replace Akkadian, until it became much more widely spoken.

Akkadian and its predecessor, Sumerian, were written using cuneiform, in which a sharpened reed creates wedge-shaped markings on a wet piece of clay. The Akkadian and Sumerian cuneiform are the earliest written languages ever discovered, though there are vastly more Akkadian than Sumerian texts available.

Translating all the tablets that remain untranslated could expose us to the first days of history

“Translating all the tablets that remain untranslated could expose us to the first days of history, to the civilization of those people, what they believed in, what they were talking about, what they were documenting,” said Gutherz.

Some of the translated tablets have information that is still relevant today. “If he cleans his garments, his days will be long,” according to one Akkadian scribe more than 3,000 years ago.

Tablet Inscribed with a Fragment of the Babylonian Flood Story Epic of Atrahasis in Akkadian, Mesopotamia, First Dynasty of Babylon, reign of King Ammi-saduqa (ca. 1646–1626 BCE). 

(The Morgan Library & Museum)

The team is also sharing its opensource research online, in the hope that other experts can create translation programs for other ancient or dead languages, Guetherz said.
Lost in translation?

Translation is an art form, so it can be difficult to measure numerically what constitutes a “good” translation, Gutherz said. In order to rate the translations, the researchers used the Best Bilingual Evaluation Understudy 4 (BLEU4), an evaluation tool developed in the early 2000s to automatically measure the accuracy of machine-created translations.

According to the study, the neural machine translation provided a BLEU4 score of 36.52 for cuneiform to English, and a score of 37.47 for transliterated cuneiform to English. BLEU4 scores are from 0 to 100, with 0 being the lowest and 100 being a perfect translation, which even a human translator could not achieve. Around 37 is considered fairly good for an early-stage translation model, explained Gutherz.

Gutherz said that Google Translate, a privately-funded commercial tool that has been in existence for over a decade, would get a BLEU4 score of about 60 translating from Spanish to English.

“One of the main achievements in the research is we showed that it’s possible to get a high-quality translation going directly from cuneiform to English,” said Gutherz, who was previously a software engineer for Google and is now starting an AI business involving different technology from this project. The current time-consuming research process usually requires experts to translate the cuneiform first to the Latin transliteration, and then largely to English.

A rendering of how AI translates Akkadian cuneiform into English, using Latin transliteration or going straight to English. (courtesy Gai Gutherz)

In 2020, Gutherz, archaeologist Prof. Shai Gordin of Ariel University, and others published a paper about using AI to translate Akkadian cuneiform to a transliterated Latin script. The transliterated script reads as a nonsensical collection of letters and numbers to the untrained eye, but is a common “language” that allows archaeologists and researchers to study and discuss cuneiform across the world.

In the 2020 paper, the team was able to use AI to achieve 97 percent accuracy from Akkadian cuneiform to transliterated Latin script. This is a much simpler process since it works by translating the cuneiform symbols to a single word, and keeping the words in the same order that they were found.

Translating Akkadian to English or transliterated script to English is a much more complicated process because it requires the computer to string together full phrases or sentences that make sense in English, which is written in a different syntactical order.

Some translations were very good… and some were total ‘hallucinations’

Gutherz said that despite the complexity, the AI translations performed better than expected, though the program is still in the early stages and far from precise. Predictably, the AI had a higher level of accuracy for formulaic texts, such as royal decrees or divinations, which follow a certain pattern. More literary and poetic texts, such as letters from priests or treaties, had a higher incidence of “hallucinations,” an AI term meaning that the machine produced a result that is completely unrelated to the text provided.

Members of the team that piloted AI to translate Akkadian cuneiform present their work at a conference. (courtesy, Gai Gutherz)

One of the things that most surprised the researchers is that the translations captured the style or rhythm of a certain genre so that they could determine — simply based on the style of the translation — if the text was a formulaic legal document, astrological report, or scholarly letter.

“Some translations were very good, some were near the point, where you could start from it, but you would have to make it more accurate manually, and some were total hallucinations,” said Gutherz. “This is the first step for an automatic translation for Akkadian and ancient languages, and I really hope more research will be done in this area and translations will get better and have higher accuracy.”
Just like Google Translate

The biggest challenge for training the AI model was the limited amount of material — images of tablets and translated tablets — that the team had available to train the AI model. Even the largest online databases of Akkadian tablets have only tens of thousands of entries.

“The amount of data you train on is correlative to how well you can perform, and the more data you have, the better your models will be,” said Gutherz. “ChatGPT works so well because they managed to train it on basically the entire internet. For us, the main task at the beginning was to gather all the possible translations we could get, to generate as many examples as possible.”

Gai Gutherz, part of the team that is piloting AI to translate Akkadian cuneiform. (courtesy)

The team drew their samples from ORACC, the Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus, an online database from the University of Pennsylvania. For the data they were able to scan, the researchers used 90% of the material for training (50,544 sentences), 5% for validation (2,808 sentences), and 5% for testing (2,808 sentences).

During the 3,000 years that Akkadian was used, there are massive variances. Written Akkadian from 1,000 years apart can have completely different cuneiform symbols, and there were differences in dialects, which add to the complexity.

Gutherz said he decided to take on ancient languages for his final project in natural language processing (NLP), after archaeologist Prof. Shai Gordin, a senior lecturer in Assyriology and Digital Humanities at Ariel University, made a presentation to his NLP class.

Not many researchers are trying to use modern computer science methods to try to work on ancient languages

“I’m interested in history, I think it has a lot to teach us,” said Gutherz. “I realize that not many researchers are trying to use modern computer science methods to try to work on ancient languages. It’s a field that I felt I could contribute to because it’s not in the spotlight… not many people are working on it.”

Just click ‘translate’

An early demo version of the translation project from cuneiform to transliteration is available online to the public on a portal called The Babylon Engine. The research and source code for the current project can be found on GitHub on Akkademia and the Colaboratory.

Not all Akkadian experts are lining up to use the new technology, though.

“I’m an old school philologist who’s sitting at a table, looking at the tablets and reading them as humans used to do for thousands of years,” said Prof. Nathan Wasserman, a professor of Assyriology at the Institute of Archaeology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He looked into the AI translation opportunities in the paper, but is not convinced that they would be useful for him.

“We’re post-ChatGPT and we’re in a different world now, so if I say, ‘It won’t work,’ that makes me look stupid,” Wasserman said. “Of course, it will work, I didn’t land from the moon yesterday. But for deeper and less formulaic texts, this is still very far from being useful.”

Prof. Nathan Wasserman, professor of Assyriology at the Institute of Archaeology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. (courtesy)

Wasserman’s area of expertise is the most complicated and poetic Akkadian texts, including hymns, prayers, and myths, often found on tablets that are in the worst condition and exceptionally difficult to read. His work is not just about translating, but about understanding the context within Akkadian culture and literature, he said. And he is interested in watching the way this technology develops, even if he is not rushing to use it now.

“I’m old enough to remember the start of Google Translate, and it was a joke, but now you can do large amounts of texts and get a decent result, plus or minus,” he said. “But what happens if you put Hamlet into Google Translate, will you get a decent translation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet?”

Wasserman said he thinks that AI can be most useful to scan large bodies of digitized tablets and try to find connections. For example, the names of a certain priest or king could pop up on two totally unrelated tablets, maybe even ones that were found in different locations and are housed at different libraries and could lead to new understandings. He is also curious about using the program to track statistics about different word usage, including the chronological or geographic distribution of certain words.

A stone tablet with cuneiform writing is seen in the foreground, as UNESCO’s Iraq representative, Louise Haxthausen, documents the damage wreaked by the Islamic State group at the ancient site of Nimrud, Iraq, on December 14, 2016. (AP Photo/Maya Alleruzzo)

Wasserman counts himself among the “old school” researchers, but he is no enemy to using technology for ancient languages. Wasserman was part of the team that developed SEAL, Sources of Early Akkadian Literature. The online database, hosted by Hebrew University, was one of the pioneering digitization projects of Akkadian cuneiform tablets when it started in 2010. Newly digitized tablets are still uploaded on a regular basis, and the site today remains one of the largest deposits of Akkadian literary works from 3000-1000 BCE.

“I’m not worried [about AI], I’m curious, it’s a brave new world and I’m curious to see what will happen,” he said. “It’s not like I’m working in a bank, and worried I’ll be sent home because a machine will do my work.”

“When you have a text, even when you have the words correct, it doesn’t mean you understand what’s there. For that, you still need the human mind,” he said. “I’m not afraid of [the AI], but also, we should not be totally infatuated with it. It should be evaluated for what it can do for us, and for what it cannot.”

Rockfall narrowly misses village of Brienz in Switzerland

Footage shows the aftermath of the large rockslide in Brienz, in eastern Switzerland.

Relieved residents of a village in south-east Switzerland say a huge rock mass, which was feared would fall and destroy their homes, has come down but stopped just short of the settlement.

Key points:

The Swiss village was evacuated last month

About two-thirds of the rock mass has fallen

Residents will not be able to return home just yet

Brienz was evacuated in early May after 1.9 million cubic metres of rock was deemed at risk of breaking away and potentially destroying the village.

Most of the rock mass tumbled late on Thursday night, with the head of the local council saying the rockslide stopped just short of Brienz, leaving a "metres-high deposit" in front of the school building.

"We can say that today is one of the best days since the evacuation," Daniel Albertin said.

"The wait for the mountain was long. But now the mountain has come down as we envisioned, and … a great deal has come down, but nothing is damaged in the village and no inhabitants were harmed."

Somewhere between 1.2 and 1.5 million cubic metres of rock has come down the slope towards Brienz.(AP: Michael Buholzer)

About two-thirds of the rock — somewhere between 1.2 and 1.5 million cubic metres — appears to have come down the slope, geologist Stefan Schneider said at a news conference.

"This is very good news because the danger … to the village has become much smaller," he said.

Residents had been able to come back to retrieve items from time to time but only for 90 minutes at a time.

Officials had said that experts saw a 60 per cent chance of the rock falling in smaller chunks that might not reach the village or valley, but also a 10 per cent chance that the entire mass would tumble down, threatening lives and property.

They said the chances of residents returning to the village was high, but they could not confirm when that might be.

"The people of Brienz will still have to be a bit patient before they can move back," Mr Albertin said.

"We have to carry out further evaluations before we can give them enough security to be able to move back to their village and continue living or working there."

AP/ABC

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