{"id":137267,"date":"2022-03-22T23:02:29","date_gmt":"2022-03-23T06:02:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/03\/a-i-is-translating-messages-of-long-lost-languages"},"modified":"2022-03-22T23:02:29","modified_gmt":"2022-03-23T06:02:29","slug":"a-i-is-translating-messages-of-long-lost-languages","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/03\/a-i-is-translating-messages-of-long-lost-languages","title":{"rendered":"A.I. is translating messages of long-lost languages"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/a-i-is-translating-messages-of-long-lost-languages2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>There are about <strong>6,500\u20137,000 <\/strong>languages currently spoken in the world. But that\u2019s less than a quarter of all the languages people spoke over the course of human history. That total number is around <strong>31,000 languages,<\/strong> according to some <a href=\"https:\/\/www.uh.edu\/engines\/epi2723.htm\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">linguistic estimates.<\/a> Every time a language is lost, so goes that way of thinking, of relating to the world. The relationships, the poetry of life uniquely described through that language are lost too. But what if you could figure out how to read the dead languages? Researchers from <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mit.edu\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">MIT<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/ai.google\/research\/teams\/brain\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Google Brain<\/a> created an AI-based system that can accomplish just that.<\/p>\n<p>While languages change, many of the symbols and how the words and characters are distributed stay relatively constant over time. Because of that, you could attempt to decode a long-lost language if you understood its relationship to a known progenitor language. This insight is what allowed the team which included <strong>Jiaming Luo <\/strong>and <strong>Regina Barzilay<\/strong> from MIT and <strong>Yuan Cao<\/strong> from Google\u2019s AI lab to use machine learning to decipher the early Greek language <strong>Linear B <\/strong>(from 1,400 BC) and a cuneiform <strong>Ugaritic<\/strong> (early Hebrew) language that\u2019s also over 3,000 years old.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There are about 6,500\u20137,000 languages currently spoken in the world. But that\u2019s less than a quarter of all the languages people spoke over the course of human history. That total number is around 31,000 languages, according to some linguistic estimates. Every time a language is lost, so goes that way of thinking, of relating to [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":556,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-137267","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-robotics-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137267","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/556"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=137267"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137267\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=137267"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=137267"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=137267"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}