Regina Barzilay, an associate professor in MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, Ben Snyder, a grad student in her lab, and the University of Southern California’s Kevin Knight will present a paper on a new computer system that, in a matter of hours, deciphered much of the ancient Semitic language Ugaritic at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics in Sweden next month. In addition to helping archaeologists decipher the eight or so ancient languages that have so far resisted their efforts, the work could also help expand the number of languages that automated translation systems like Google Translate can handle.

Some suppose that a system like the one they designed with Knight would never replace human decipherers. But it can be a powerful tool that can aid the human decipherment process. Moreover, a variation of it could also help expand the versatility of translation software. Many online translators rely on the analysis of parallel texts to determine word correspondences: They might, for instance, go through the collected works of Voltaire, Balzac, Proust and a host of other writers, in both English and French, looking for consistent mappings between words.

See: MIT News