Maybe this program can help our archaeologists and historians to decipher old artifacts inscribed with a language they haven’t encountered or deciphered yet. The system’s creators, researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), claim that the program can decipher a lost language without knowledge of its relation to other languages, as VentureBeat details:
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This CSAIL work, which was supported in part by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity and spearheaded by MIT professor Regina Barzilay, a specialist in natural language processing, leverages several principles grounded in insights from historical linguistics. For instance, while a given language rarely adds or deletes a sound, certain sound substitutions are likely to occur. A word with a “p” in the parent language may change into a “b” in the descendant language, but changing to a “k” is less likely due to the significant pronunciation gap.
By incorporating these and other linguistic constraints, Barzilay and Luo developed a decipherment algorithm that can handle the vast space of transformations and the scarcity of a signal in the input. The algorithm learns to embed language sounds into a multidimensional space where differences in pronunciation are reflected in the distance between corresponding vectors. This design enables the system to capture patterns of language change and express them as computational constraints. The resulting model can segment words in an ancient language and map them to counterparts in a related language.
With the new system, the relationship between languages is inferred by the algorithm; the algorithm can assess the proximity between two languages. Moreover, when tested on known languages, it can accurately identify language families.
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Source: neatorama