Computers to translate world's 'lost' languages after program deciphers ancient text
By Niall Firth
Last updated at 4:15 PM on 20th July 2010
Scientists have used a computer program to decipher a written language that is more than three thousand years old.
科學家們已用一電腦程式來破解一書面語言，那是多過3,000年之久。
The program automatically translated the ancient written language of Ugaritic within just a few hours.
程式祇在幾小時內自動翻譯古代烏加里特的書面語言。
Scientists hope the breakthrough could help them decipher the few ancient languages that they have been unable to translate so far.
科學家們希望，突破能幫助他們破譯幾種古老的語言，至今他們都未能翻譯。
Ugaritic was last used around 1200 B.C. in western Syria and consists of dots on clay tablets. It was first discovered in 1920 but was not deciphered until 1932.
烏加里特是在約公元前1200年在敘利亞西部最後使用，包含點點在泥片上。它是在1920年首次發現 ，但未有解密直到1932年。
The computer program was able to decipher many of the words that Ugaritic (pictured) has in common with Hebrew電腦程式能破譯許多字詞，烏加里特（圖）與希伯來文有共同處
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology told the program that the language was related to another known language, in this case Hebrew.
The system is then able to make assumptions about the way different words are formed and whether they consist of a prefix and a suffix, for example.
Through repeated analysis, the program linked letters and words to map nearly all Ugaritic symbols to their Hebrew equivalents in a matter of hours.
The system looks for commonly used symbols in the two languages and gradually refines its mapping of the alphabet until it can go no further.
The Ugaritic alphabet has 30 letters, and the system correctly mapped 29 of them to their Hebrew counterparts.
Of the words that the two languages shared the program was able to correctly identify 60 per cent of them.
Science professor Regina Barzilay, who was leading the research, said: ‘Traditionally, decipherment has been viewed as a sort of scholarly detective game, and computers weren't thought to be of much use.
‘Our aim is to bring to bear the full power of modern machine learning and statistics to this problem.’
Other researchers have expressed scepticism about the program and say that it is of little use because many of the undeciphered texts have no known ancestor to map against.
The program also assumes that the computer knows where one word begins and another ends, something which is not always the case
A clay tablet found at the ancient city of Ugarit, dating from around 1400 BC一泥板發現於烏加里特古城，追溯到公元前1400年左右
But Professor Barzilay thinks the system can overcome this hurdle by scanning multiple languages at once and taking contextual information into account
She said: ‘Each language has its own challenges. Most likely, a successful decipherment would require one to adjust the method for the peculiarities of a language.’
But she points out the decipherment of Ugaritic took years and relied on some happy coincidences — such as the discovery of an axe that had the word “axe” written on it in Ugaritic.
‘The output of our system would have made the process orders of magnitude shorter,’ she says.
The system could also improve the reliability of translation software like Google Translate, the researchers believe.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1296214/Computer-program-translates-ancient-language.html
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