unsupervised language acquisition, efficient algorithms for NLP, linguistically rich models of language, integrating symbolic and statistical methods for NLP, organization of the web, machine translation, information extraction
Ancient languages hold a treasure trove of information about the culture, politics and commerce of millennia past. Yet, reconstructing them to reveal clues into human history can require decades of painstaking work. Now, scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, have created an automated “time machine,” of sorts, that will greatly accelerate and improve the process of reconstructing hundreds of ancestral languages.
