They haven't unlocked anything. At best, they've gained confidence in the type of lock.

The title on the site is bad ("unlock more secrets of ancient script"), especially for a place called "science daily". The title here is atrocious. The end of the first paragraph is "researchers are using mathematics and computer science to try to piece together information about the still-unknown script."

Agree about the bad title; but it does resolve an important question, which was whether the script was a language at all. Establishing that it has the regularities of human language was a necessary first step.

Here's another interesting example. The Luwian script's directionality couldn't be established. It was not certain whether it was up-down, up-down or up-down, down-up or various possibilities. This paper established using Expectation-Maximization the correct order of reading for the script:

Discovering the linear writing order of a two-dimensional ancient hieroglyphic script http://www.csie.ntu.edu.tw/~sdlin/publications.html

Luwian script: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hieroglyphic_Luwian

> "One of the main purposes of our paper is to introduce Markov models, and statistical models in general, as computational tools for investigating ancient scripts," Adhikari said.

This is bogus. (Hidden) Markov Models and other generative probabilistic models have been used in all kinds of decipherment for years - see the latter half of http://www.isi.edu/natural-language/people/naacl09-print-1x2... for an overview.

Google should create a translation module for dead languages. Why stop at scanning old books? Scan some ancient tablets Sergey!

Modern statistical machine translation works by training on large amounts of already translated data, called parallel corpora. Monolingual data is helpful and can help you fix grammar, choose words that are more likely, but it won't work without that parallel corpora. Basically, you need a Rosetta stone, and if you had that, the humans could slowly deduce all sorts of things from only a small amount of data that would probably be useless for an MT system. Actually, scanning, or OCR, is a similar process--you train first on text that already has been properly transcribed, then you have a model that can be used to do OCR on new data.

I think the researcher here has confused Bayesian inference with Markov chaining? I'm doubtful this is an effective approach to unlock any kind of -meaning- from the inscriptions.

If this isn't an article for PG's comment, I don't know what is :)

such an approach might teach them everything about the language's syntax but nothing about its semantics.. but i guess deciphering that would be a lot easier once they can identify the structural components of the sentences

the paper be found here: http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0901/0901.3017v1.pdf