Simple Effective Decipherment via Combinatorial Optimization

We present a simple objective function that when optimized yields accurate solutions to both decipherment and cognate pair identification problems. The objective simultaneously scores a matching between two alphabets and a matching between two lexicons, each in a different language. We introduce a simple coordinate descent procedure that efficiently finds effective solutions to the resulting combinatorial optimization problem. Our system requires only a list of words in both languages as input, yet it competes with and surpasses several state-of-the-art systems that are both substantially more complex and make use of more information.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: EMNLP
• Authors: Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick, Dan Klein
• Keywords: Accurate Solutions, Art Systems, Combinatorial Optimization Problem, EMNLP 2011, Natural Language Processing