The Decipherment of Charred Documents

Decipherment of Charred Documents

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

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.

UNRAVEL - A Decipherment Toolkit

In this paper we present the UNRAVEL toolkit: It implements many of the recently published works on decipherment, including decipherment for deterministic ciphers like e.g. the ZODIAC-408 cipher and Part two of the BEALE ciphers, as well as decipherment of probabilistic ciphers and unsupervised training for machine translation. It also includes data and example configuration files so that the p...

Improved Decipherment of Homophonic Ciphers

In this paper, we present two improvements to the beam search approach for solving homophonic substitution ciphers presented in Nuhn et al. (2013): An improved rest cost estimation together with an optimized strategy for obtaining the order in which the symbols of the cipher are deciphered reduces the beam size needed to successfully decipher the Zodiac-408 cipher from several million down to l...