COMPUTER scientists have developed a program that can teach itself new languages. Feed it a piece of text, in any language, and the program analyses its structure and can then produce new, meaningful sentences.
Conventional translation software programs have all the rules of grammar coded into them. But the ADIOS (automatic distillation of structure) program, developed by researchers at Cornell University in New York and Tel Aviv University in Israel, infers the building blocks of a language using statistical and algebraic processes. The software learns the grammar of a new language by searching text for patterns. The researchers think the…
