Ancient language deciphering systen could help translation software

A computer system designed to decipher ancient language could online translation software like Google Translate.

MIT BOFFINS have designed a language mapping system that translated an ancient Semitic language called Ugaritic in a couple of hours. The MIT researchers also reckon that their translator works very similarly to machine translation, so it can be used in conjunction with translation software.

The system assumes that languages' alphabets, cognates and words can be cross-mapped because they're related. The team used Hebrew to open up the secrets of Ugaritic along with some AI probabilistic modelling chucked in for good measure.

The team mapped competing hypotheses for the symbol frequency of prefixes and suffixes. This was then fed though probabilistic modelling until its consistency could be refined no further.

"We iterate through the data hundreds of times, thousands of times," said MIT graduate student Ben Snyder.

"And each time, our guesses have higher probability, because we're actually coming closer to a solution where we get more consistency."

While it won't replace human intuition in deciphering scripts, it could be the perfect tool for automatic software translation. Online translating tools like Google translate also use a similar system. They look for consistent mapping beween words by analysing parallel texts in different languages. µ