DUBAI: Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Google Brain have an artificial intelligence-system that can read dead languages, according to the MIT Technology Review.
According to Big Think, a website containing a collection of interviews, presentations, and roundtable discussions with experts from a wide range of fields, there are about 6,500 to 7,000 languages currently spoken in the world.
But that’s less than a quarter of all the languages people spoke over the course of human history, the site said in an article, adding that the total number can be around 31,000 languages.
“Every time a language is lost, so goes that way of thinking, of relating to the world. The relationships, the poetry of life uniquely described through that language are lost too. But what if you could figure out how to read the dead languages?” wrote writer-filmmaker Paul Ratner for Big Think.
Ratner explained that while languages change, many of the symbols and how the words and characters are distributed actually stay relatively constant over time. Because of that, he said, people could attempt to decode a long-lost language if they understood its relationship to a known progenitor language.
Enter Jiaming Luo and Regina Barzilay from MIT and Yuan Cao from Google’s AI lab to use machine learning to decipher the early Greek language Linear B (from 1400 BC) and a cuneiform Ugaritic (early Hebrew) language that’s also over 3,000 years old, said the Big Think report.
The team “trained” the AI network to do the deciphering and voila! It achieve correct translation of 67% of Linear B cognates.
