
Computer automatically deciphers ancient language - xaverius
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2010/ugaritic-barzilay-0630.html
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todayiamme
When I studied NLP one of the first thing that was drilled into my head by
that book (<http://www-nlp.stanford.edu/fsnlp/promo/>) was that these are all
_statistical_ techniques and context based understanding of a corpus is still
a while away. The problem really is to condense all of that knowledge about
the real world into a form that is computable. As that really famous example
goes, how do you tell a computer that water is 'wet'?

However, this is still an extremely important development and it shows that
sooner or later by leveraging the things computers are good at we will be able
to solve such problems. I really don't think that it is something impossible
to do. It just requires a new approach that none of us have thought about.
After all not too long ago nuclear fission was said to be impossible, until a
chain reaction was conceptualized.

Perhaps AI will go this way too, the difficult almost intractable problems
will turn out to be easy under some new paradigm. Perhaps not. We'll never
really know until we try.

So kudos Regina Barzilay and her team for pushing the limits.

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torial
For more details the research article:
[http://people.csail.mit.edu/bsnyder/papers/bsnyder_acl2010.p...](http://people.csail.mit.edu/bsnyder/papers/bsnyder_acl2010.pdf)

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r3570r3
MIT continues to amaze me in multiple ways. Another one got added to the list.

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shard
Universal translator, here we come!

~~~
arethuza
The process is based on making significant assumptions - mainly that the
language in question has some kind of mapping to a known language. Note that
this is pretty much how things like Linear B were deciphered so it is quite an
achievement.

Not really a "universal translator" as it presumably won't work with a
language that has no shared structures with other languages.

~~~
patrickgzill
"Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra"

~~~
drallison
From Wikipedia: "Darmok" is an episode of the television science fiction
series Star Trek: The Next Generation, first broadcast in the United States on
September 30, 1991; it was written by Joe Menosky. The episode contains a
brief, but notable recounting of the Gilgamesh epic, which is communicated by
Picard to the Tamarian captain. The episode has an average rating of 4.5/5 on
the official Star Trek website (as of 18 August 2009 (2009 -08-18)

~~~
oconnor0
The most relevant part of that episode to this discussion being that the
universal translator still left the language on the planet unintelligible
because they spoke in metaphor & with allusions to their planet's version of
the Gilgamesh epic.

Thus "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra"

