Skip to main content

Can Artificial Intelligence Decipher Lost Languages? Researchers Attempt to Decode 3500-Year-Old Ancient Languages

Image by Olaf Tausch via Wikimedia Commons

We may not see warp drives any time soon, but another piece of Star Trek tech, the universal translator, maybe become a reality in our lifetime, if it hasn’t already. Machine learning “has proven to be very competent” when it comes to translation, “so much so that the CEO of one of the world’s largest employers of human translators has warned that many of them should be facing up the stark reality of losing their job to a machine,” writes Bernard Marr at Forbes.

But the fact that AI can do things humans do doesn't mean that it does those things well. One Google researcher put the case plainly in an interview with Wired: “People naively believe that if you take deep learning and… 1,000 times more data, a neural net will be able to do anything a human being can do, but that’s just not true.” AI translators have advanced significantly in the past few years, with Google’s Translatotron prototype (yes, that’s its real name), promising to interpret “tone and cadence.” Still, AI translations are often stilted, awkward, and occasionally incomprehensible approximations that no human would come up with.

Does AI’s limitations with living language hinder its ability to decipher very long dead ones, whose orthography, grammar, and syntax has been completely lost? Yuan Cao from Google’s AI lab and Jiaming Luo and Regina Barzilay from MIT put machine learning to the test when they developed a “system capable of deciphering lost languages.” They took a very different approach “from the standard machine translation techniques,” reports the MIT Technology Review, using less data instead of more, a technique they call "minimum-cost flow."

The researchers tested their translation machine on both the 3500-year-old Linear B and Ugaritic, an ancient form of Hebrew, both of which have already been deciphered by people. Still, the AI was “able to translate both languages with remarkable accuracy,” with a rate of 67.3% in the translation of cognates in Linear B. The far older Bronze Age Minoan script Linear A, however (see it at the top), “one of the earliest forms of writing ever discovered… is conspicuous for its absence.” No human has yet been able to decipher it.

A lost language translator machine that only works on languages that have already been translated (it needs preexisting data on the progenitor language to function) may not seem particularly useful. Then again, it could be one step in the direction of what the authors call the “automatic decipherment of lost languages," those that humans can’t already work out on their own. Read the paper “Neural Decipherment via Minimum-Cost Flow: From Ugaritic to Linear B” at arXiv.

via MIT Technology Review

Related Content:  

Artificial Intelligence May Have Cracked the Code of the Voynich Manuscript: Has Modern Technology Finally Solved a Medieval Mystery?

Artificial Intelligence for Everyone: An Introductory Course from Andrew Ng, the Co-Founder of Coursera

Artificial Intelligence Identifies the Six Main Arcs in Storytelling: Welcome to the Brave New World of Literary Criticism

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

Can Artificial Intelligence Decipher Lost Languages? Researchers Attempt to Decode 3500-Year-Old Ancient Languages is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.



from Open Culture https://ift.tt/2JJlHCx
via Ilumina

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

When Albert Einstein & Charlie Chaplin Met and Became Fast Famous Friends (1930)

Photo via Wikimedia Commons “You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother,” goes a well-known quote attributed variously to Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, and Ernest Rutherford. No matter who said it, “the sentiment… rings true,” writes Michelle Lavery , “for researchers in all disciplines from particle physics to ecopsychology.” As Feynman discovered during his many years of teaching , it could be “the motto of all professional communicators,” The Guardian ’s Russell Grossman writes , “and especially those who earn a living communicating the tricky business of science.” Einstein became one of the world’s great science communicators by choice, not necessity, and found ways to explain his complex theories to children and the elderly alike. But perhaps, if he’d had his way, he would rather have avoided words altogether, and preferred acrobatic feats of silent daring to get his message across. We might at least conclude so from his reverence f...
Post a Comment
Read more

1,100 Delicate Drawings of Root Systems Reveals the Hidden World of Plants

We know that plants can inspire art. If you, personally, still require convincing on that point, just have a look at Elizabeth Twining’s Illustrations of the Natural Orders of Plants , the drawings of Ernst Heinrich Haeckel , Elizabeth Blackwell’s  A Curious Herbal , and Nancy Anne Kingsbury Wollstonecraft’s Specimens of the Plants and Fruits of the Island of Cuba — not to mention the paintings of Georgia O’ Keeffe — all previously featured here on Open Culture. But those works concern themselves only with plant life as it exists above ground. What goes on down below, underneath the soil? That you can see for yourself — and without having to pull up one of our fine flowering (or non-flowering) friends to do so — at Wageningen University’s online archive of root system drawings . “The outcome of 40 years of  root system excavations in Europe,” says that site, the collection contains 1,180 diagrams of species from  Abies alba (best known today as a kind of Christmas t...
Post a Comment
Read more

Zamrock: An Introduction to Zambia’s 1970s Rich & Psychedelic Rock Scene

The story of popular music in the late 20th century is never complete without an account of the explosive psychedelic rock, funk, Afrobeat, and other hybrid styles that proliferated on the African continent and across Latin American and the Caribbean in the 1960s and 70s. It’s only lately, however, that large audiences are discovering how much pioneering music came out of Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria, and other postcolonial countries, thanks to UK labels like Strut and Soundway (named by The Guardian as “one of the 10 British Labels defining the sound of 2014” and named “Label of the Year” in 2017). Germany’s Analogue Africa , a label that reissues classic albums from the era, puts it this way: “the future of music happened decades ago.” Only most Western audiences weren’t paying attention—with notable exceptions, of course: superstar drummer Ginger Baker apprenticed himself to Fela Kuti and became an evangelist for African drumming; Brian Eno and Talking Heads’ David Byrne ( who ...
Post a Comment
Read more