{"id":18205,"date":"2022-02-12T04:33:11","date_gmt":"2022-02-12T04:33:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/?p=18205"},"modified":"2022-02-12T04:33:11","modified_gmt":"2022-02-12T04:33:11","slug":"an-ancient-language-has-defied-translation-for-100-years-can-ai-crack-the-code","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2022\/02\/12\/an-ancient-language-has-defied-translation-for-100-years-can-ai-crack-the-code\/","title":{"rendered":"An Ancient Language Has Defied Translation for 100 Years. Can AI Crack the Code?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

KARACHI, PAKISTAN, February 8, 2022 (Restofworld.org): Jiaming Luo grew up in mainland China thinking about neglected languages. When he was younger, he wondered why the different languages his mother and father spoke were often lumped together as Chinese \u201cdialects.\u201d When he became a computer science doctoral student at MIT in 2015, his interest collided with his advisor\u2019s long-standing fascination with ancient scripts. After all, what could be more neglected than a long-lost language, left to us as enigmatic symbols on scattered fragments? In 2019, Luo made headlines when, working with a team of fellow MIT researchers, he brought his machine-learning expertise to the decipherment of ancient scripts. He and his colleagues developed an algorithm informed by patterns in how languages change over time. They fed their algorithm words in a lost language and in a known related language; its job was to align words from the lost language with their counterparts in the known language.

The work raised an intriguing proposition. Could machine learning assist researchers in their quests to crack other, as-yet undeciphered scripts \u2014 ones that have so far resisted all attempts at translation? What historical secrets might be unlocked as a result? It is remarkable how little we know about the original people of the Indus Valley, who at one point constituted nearly 10% of the world\u2019s inhabitants. It is especially galling given how much more we know about their contemporaries, such as the people of the Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilizations. Part of the reason for this is the continued elusiveness of the Indus script. Putting machines to work on the Indus script is tricky. We don\u2019t have a great deal of information about the Indus script: most crucially, we don\u2019t know what other language it may be related to. As a result, a model like Luo\u2019s wouldn\u2019t work for the Indus script. That\u2019s not to say technology can\u2019t help, though. In some ways, computer modeling has already played a crucial role: by showing that the Indus script is, in fact, a language and not just individual symbols with only one meaning.

Much more of this lengthy and interesting article at \u201csource\u201d.
https:\/\/restofworld.org\/2022\/indus-translation-ai-code-script\/<\/a>
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

KARACHI, PAKISTAN, February 8, 2022 (Restofworld.org): Jiaming Luo grew up in mainland China thinking about neglected languages. When he was,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":18210,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18205","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18205","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18205"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18205\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18211,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18205\/revisions\/18211"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18210"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18205"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18205"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18205"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}