Solving Historical Dictionary Codes with a Neural Language Model

Christopher Chu, Raphael Valenti, Kevin Knight

Computational Social Science and Social Media Long Paper

Gather-4F: Nov 18, Gather-4F: Nov 18 (02:00-04:00 UTC) [Join Gather Meeting]

You can open the pre-recorded video in a separate window.

Abstract: We solve difficult word-based substitution codes by constructing a decoding lattice and searching that lattice with a neural language model. We apply our method to a set of enciphered letters exchanged between US Army General James Wilkinson and agents of the Spanish Crown in the late 1700s and early 1800s, obtained from the US Library of Congress. We are able to decipher 75.1% of the cipher-word tokens correctly.
NOTE: Video may display a random order of authors. Correct author list is at the top of this page.

Connected Papers in EMNLP2020

Similar Papers