Pencil Erasures. Detection and Decipherment

Decipherment

The first natural language processing systems had a straightforward goal: decipher coded messages sent by the enemy. This tutorial explores connections between early decipherment research and today’s NLP work. We cover classic military and diplomatic ciphers, automatic decipherment algorithms, unsolved ciphers, language translation as decipherment, and analyzing ancient writing as decipherment.

Writing Systems, Transliteration and Decipherment

Description Nearly all of the core data that computational linguists deal with is in the form of text, which is to say that it consists of language data written (usually) in the standard writing system for the language in question. Yet surprisingly little is generally understood about how writing systems work. This tutorial will be divided into three parts. In the first part we discuss the hist...

The Decipherment of Hieroglyphs

Hieroglyphs dominated the landscape of the Egyptian civilisation. These elaborate symbols were ideal for inscriptions on the walls of majestic temples and monuments, and indeed the Greek word hieroglyphica means 'sacred carvings', but they were too fussy for day-to-day scribbling, so other scripts were evolved in Egypt in parallel. These were the 'hieratic' and 'demotic' scripts, which can crud...

Decipherment of Charred Documents

Frames, Graphs and Erasures

Two-uniform frames and their use for the coding of vectors are the main subject of this paper. These frames are known to be optimal for handling up to two erasures, in the sense that they minimize the largest possible error when up to two frame coefficients are set to zero. Here, we consider various numerical measures for the reconstruction error associated with a frame when an arbitrary number...