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Neural Decipherment via Minimum-Cost Flow: From Ugaritic to Linear B (arxiv.org)
2 points by bookofjoe on Jul 15, 2019 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: A system deciphers lost languages by learning how letters changed between related languages, then pairing words at lowest total cost instead of guessing matches. It beat the best earlier Ugaritic results by 5.5% and translated 67.3% of Linear B words related to ancient Greek.

Abstract · Neural Decipherment via Minimum-Cost Flow: from Ugaritic to Linear B

In this paper we propose a novel neural approach for automatic decipherment of lost languages. To compensate for the lack of strong supervision signal, our model design is informed by patterns in language change documented in historical linguistics. The model utilizes an expressive sequence-to-sequence model to capture character-level correspondences between cognates. To effectively train the model in an unsupervised manner, we innovate the training procedure by formalizing it as a minimum-cost flow problem. When applied to the decipherment of Ugaritic, we achieve a 5.5% absolute improvement over state-of-the-art results. We also report the first automatic results in deciphering Linear B, a syllabic language related to ancient Greek, where our model correctly translates 67.3% of cognates.

Jiaming Luo, Yuan Cao, Regina Barzilay
arXiv:1906.06718 · cs.CL · submitted Jun 16, 2019
abstract · pdf · html · Accepted by ACL 2019

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Also discussed: Oct 2020 (30 points, 13 comments) · Jul 2019 (76 points, 7 comments)