A.I. is translating messages of long-lost languages
Curated from: bigthink.com
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Tum-vel Tor Marom Heh Yeht-urgam Dvinsu, Hi Nash-veh Ma Rai Ista
There are about 6,500 - 7,000 languages currently spoken in the world. According to some linguistic estimates, there may have been upwards of 31,000 in all of history. (31,001 if you count Vulcan?)
Every time a language dies, so goes a way of life, lore, and knowledge. Imagine life now if the Library of Alexandria had never burned.
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Don’t Be So Obtuse!
But what if you could figure out how to read the dead languages?
- Researchers from MIT and Google Brain created an AI-based system for this purpose
- Languages change with use (think slang & idioms), but the characters and distribution remains relatively similar.
- Because of that, you could attempt to decode a long-lost language if you understood its relationship to a known progenitor language.
- The team - Jiaming Luo and Regina Barzilay used their machine decipher the early Greek language Linear B (see ZING!er up top 🙄) as a control test, as it was deciphered to in 1952/3 by Michael Ventris
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Channel All Reserve Power To The Progenitor!!
The approach by the researchers focused on 4 key properties
- distributional similarity
- monotonic character mapping
- structural sparsity
- significant cognate overlap
The AI network achieved 67.3% translation of cognate (relative test) words.
- if a name for the system hasn’t been chosen, might I suggest HAL, Skynet, GERTY, or lovingly, Rosie? Wait! Call it Daniel Jackson and wake up Michael Shanks - he has work to do!
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And For Our Next Trick…
Next on the list? The team has begun translating Linear A, now that they’ve tried Linear B, to C if they can complete what linguists already have.
The implications are monumental. AI affords the opportunity to work tirelessly and accurately - as meatbags still require rest. The trade-off being the human imagination that so often makes the important connections (what if translating/comparing all these languages is the final spark Google’s AI needs for the singularity, if it hasn’t already 😮). Imagine an AI running 31,000 translations at once, unlocking secret after secret - Alexandria rebuilt.
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IDEAS CURATED BY
CURATOR'S NOTE
Imagine if we could replace The Library of Alexandria? AI could help! I wonder what kind of “dad jokes” ancient cultures had…(humor is an indicator of intelligence, after all)
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