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I wonder if you could decypher these scripts by bruteforcing decoding layers until an LLM could predict the next token. That would assume the text has a sort of
by tinco 1y ago
I wonder if you could decypher these scripts by bruteforcing decoding layers until an LLM could predict the next token. That would assume the text has a sort of logic to it that would still work in modern language, but the decyphering would be fully automatic so we could throw a bunch of compute at it.
- zaik 1y agoOk, your LLM can perfectly predict the next token. How do you extract the "logic" out of the weights?
- talos 1y agoI don't think OP's idea would work, but if it did you could just ask for a translation.
- privatelypublic 1y agoIn what language? The model wouldn't speak english.
- tinco 1y agoIn English. The decoder translates from the Dhofari to tokens the LLM understands. So you present the LLM with the decoded Dhofari, and a question in English, like "Please express the following in modern English" and the LLM would answer in English. There's also a chance the decoded Dhofari would be intelligible to humans directly, though I don't know how large that chance is.
- yorwba 1y agoIt's possible to identify a surprisingly large number of matching words by learning a linear transformation mapping word vectors from two different languages into the same space (e.g. https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.06297 https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.06297 ). But the problem with ancient languages is typically that there's not enough data to usefully constrain a large enough model. Doubly so for undeciphered scripts where scholars might not even agree on how many different letters there are.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- yyyk 1y agoPresumably, they'd want to get at embeddings, and compare the dimensional space somehow to say: 'the relation between tokens a,b,c is close to the relation of tokens a1,b1,c1 in a similar model of texts of known language of apparently same family (same up to aN,bN,cN), and out of these N sequences, sequence X makes most sense given existing examples'. (As you can tell, the argument involves some handwaving, but it may possible?)
- noworld 1y agoIt's LLMs all the way down.
- MohamedMabrouk 1y agothe available data from some of those lesser used scripts are miniscule. the most common ancient North Arabian script is safitic and only around 50K texts are processed and widely available each with a few words to a few sentences.