<p>Developed by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the programme has successfully decoded the over three-thousand-year-old Ugaritic language.<br /><br />Ugaritic was last used around 1200 BC in western Syria and it consists of dots on clay tablets. It was first discovered in 1920 but was not deciphered until 1932.<br /><br />To evaluate the efficiency of their programme, the researchers gave reference of the Hebrew language which is similar to Ugaritic.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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 Daily Mail reported.<br />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.<br /><br />"Our aim is to bring to bear the full power of modern machine learning and statistics to this problem."<br /><br />According to the scientists, the programme looks for commonly used symbols in the two languages and gradually refines its mapping of the alphabet until it can go no further.<br />The Ugaritic alphabet has 30 letters, and the system correctly mapped 29 of them to their Hebrew counterparts.<br /><br />Of the words that the two languages shared the programme was able to correctly identify 60 per cent of them.<br /><br />However, experts have expressed scepticism about the programme and said that it is of little use because many of the undeciphered texts have no known ancestor to map against.<br /><br />The programme also assumes that the computer knows where one word begins and another ends, something which is not always the case. <br /><br />But Professor Barzilay thinks the system can overcome this hurdle by scanning multiple languages at once and taking contextual information into account.<br /><br />"Each language has its own challenges. Most likely, a successful decipherment would require one to adjust the method for the peculiarities of a language," she said.<br /><br />She, however, pointed 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.<br /><br />"The output of our system would have made the process orders of magnitude shorter," she said.<br /><br />The scientists also expressed hope that the system could also improve the reliability of translation software like Google Translate.</p>
<p>Developed by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the programme has successfully decoded the over three-thousand-year-old Ugaritic language.<br /><br />Ugaritic was last used around 1200 BC in western Syria and it consists of dots on clay tablets. It was first discovered in 1920 but was not deciphered until 1932.<br /><br />To evaluate the efficiency of their programme, the researchers gave reference of the Hebrew language which is similar to Ugaritic.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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 Daily Mail reported.<br />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.<br /><br />"Our aim is to bring to bear the full power of modern machine learning and statistics to this problem."<br /><br />According to the scientists, the programme looks for commonly used symbols in the two languages and gradually refines its mapping of the alphabet until it can go no further.<br />The Ugaritic alphabet has 30 letters, and the system correctly mapped 29 of them to their Hebrew counterparts.<br /><br />Of the words that the two languages shared the programme was able to correctly identify 60 per cent of them.<br /><br />However, experts have expressed scepticism about the programme and said that it is of little use because many of the undeciphered texts have no known ancestor to map against.<br /><br />The programme also assumes that the computer knows where one word begins and another ends, something which is not always the case. <br /><br />But Professor Barzilay thinks the system can overcome this hurdle by scanning multiple languages at once and taking contextual information into account.<br /><br />"Each language has its own challenges. Most likely, a successful decipherment would require one to adjust the method for the peculiarities of a language," she said.<br /><br />She, however, pointed 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.<br /><br />"The output of our system would have made the process orders of magnitude shorter," she said.<br /><br />The scientists also expressed hope that the system could also improve the reliability of translation software like Google Translate.</p>