{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2025,10,27]],"date-time":"2025-10-27T21:06:57Z","timestamp":1761599217869},"reference-count":25,"publisher":"MIT Press - Journals","content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":["Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics"],"published-print":{"date-parts":[[2021,2]]},"abstract":"<jats:p> Most undeciphered lost languages exhibit two characteristics that pose significant decipherment challenges: (1) the scripts are not fully segmented into words; (2) the closest known language is not determined. We propose a decipherment model that handles both of these challenges by building on rich linguistic constraints reflecting consistent patterns in historical sound change. We capture the natural phonological geometry by learning character embeddings based on the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). The resulting generative framework jointly models word segmentation and cognate alignment, informed by phonological constraints. We evaluate the model on both deciphered languages (Gothic, Ugaritic) and an undeciphered one (Iberian). The experiments show that incorporating phonetic geometry leads to clear and consistent gains. Additionally, we propose a measure for language closeness which correctly identifies related languages for Gothic and Ugaritic. For Iberian, the method does not show strong evidence supporting Basque as a related language, concurring with the favored position by the current scholarship. <jats:sup>1<\/jats:sup> <\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1162\/tacl_a_00354","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2021,2,18]],"date-time":"2021-02-18T21:23:29Z","timestamp":1613683409000},"page":"69-81","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":9,"title":["Deciphering Undersegmented Ancient Scripts Using Phonetic Prior"],"prefix":"10.1162","volume":"9","author":[{"given":"Jiaming","family":"Luo","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"CSAIL, MIT."}]},{"given":"Frederik","family":"Hartmann","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"University of Konstanz."}]},{"given":"Enrico","family":"Santus","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Bayer."}]},{"given":"Regina","family":"Barzilay","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"CSAIL, MIT."}]},{"given":"Yuan","family":"Cao","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Google Brain."}]}],"member":"281","reference":[{"key":"bib1","first-page":"491","volume":"5","author":"Aznar Eduardo Ordu\u00f1a","year":"2005","journal-title":"Palaeohispanica"},{"key":"bib2","first-page":"874","volume-title":"Proceedings of the 2013 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing","author":"Berg-Kirkpatrick Taylor","year":"2013"},{"key":"bib3","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"69","DOI":"10.3115\/1225403.1225421","volume-title":"Proceedings of the COLING\/ACL 2006 Interactive Presentation Sessions","author":"Bird Steven","year":"2006"},{"key":"bib4","volume-title":"Historical Linguistics","author":"Campbell Lyle","year":"2013"},{"issue":"2","key":"bib5","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"375","DOI":"10.1007\/s10579-014-9287-y","volume":"49","author":"Christodouloupoulos Christos","year":"2015","journal-title":"Language Resources and Evaluation"},{"key":"bib6","first-page":"7059","volume-title":"Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems","author":"Conneau Alexis","year":"2019"},{"key":"bib7","first-page":"2314","volume-title":"Proceedings of COLING 2014, the 25th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Technical Papers","author":"Hauer Bradley","year":"2014"},{"key":"bib8","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"869","DOI":"10.18653\/v1\/D18-1102","volume-title":"Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing","author":"Kambhatla Nishant","year":"2018"},{"key":"bib9","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"499","DOI":"10.3115\/1273073.1273138","volume-title":"Proceedings of the COLING\/ACL 2006 Main Conference Poster Sessions","author":"Knight Kevin","year":"2006"},{"key":"bib10","author":"Knight Kevin","year":"1999","journal-title":"Unsupervised Learning in Natural Language Processing"},{"key":"bib11","unstructured":"Guillaume Lample, Alexis Conneau, Ludovic Denoyer, and Marc\u2019Aurelio Ranzato. 2018a. Unsupervised machine translation using monolingual corpora only."},{"key":"bib12","volume-title":"International Conference on Learning Representations","author":"Lample Guillaume","year":"2018"},{"key":"bib13","first-page":"3146","volume-title":"Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics","author":"Luo Jiaming","year":"2019"},{"issue":"1","key":"bib14","first-page":"7","volume":"23","author":"Mart\u00ed Noem\u00ed Moncunill","year":"2017","journal-title":"Studia Antiqua et Archaeologica"},{"key":"bib15","volume-title":"Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018)","author":"Mortensen David R.","year":"2018"},{"key":"bib16","first-page":"1568","volume-title":"Proceedings of the 51st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)","author":"Nuhn Malte","year":"2013"},{"key":"bib17","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"6225","DOI":"10.18653\/v1\/P19-1627","volume-title":"Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics","author":"Rama Taraka","year":"2019"},{"issue":"1","key":"bib18","first-page":"7","volume":"15","author":"Ramos Jes\u00fas Rodr\u00edguez","year":"2014","journal-title":"Arqueoweb: Revista sobre Arqueolog\u00eda en Internet"},{"key":"bib19","volume-title":"From Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic","author":"Ringe Donald A.","year":"2017"},{"key":"bib20","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","DOI":"10.1093\/oso\/9780198790822.001.0001","volume-title":"Palaeohispanic Languages and Epigraphies","author":"Sinner Alejandro Garcia","year":"2019"},{"key":"bib21","first-page":"1048","volume-title":"Proceedings of the 48th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics","author":"Snyder Benjamin","year":"2010"},{"key":"bib22","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","DOI":"10.7551\/mitpress\/1072.001.0001","volume-title":"Acoustic phonetics","volume":"30","author":"Stevens Kenneth N.","year":"2000"},{"key":"bib23","volume-title":"Etymological Dictionary of Basque","author":"Trask Larry","year":"2008"},{"key":"bib24","first-page":"286","author":"Wagner Norbert","year":"2006","journal-title":"Historische Sprachforschung\/Historical Linguistics"},{"key":"bib25","volume-title":"Das Gothische Alphabet Vulfilas und das Runen Alphabet: eine Sprachwissenschaftliche Untersuchung","author":"Zacher Julius","year":"1855"}],"container-title":["Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics"],"original-title":[],"language":"en","link":[{"URL":"https:\/\/www.mitpressjournals.org\/doi\/pdf\/10.1162\/tacl_a_00354","content-type":"unspecified","content-version":"vor","intended-application":"similarity-checking"}],"deposited":{"date-parts":[[2021,3,12]],"date-time":"2021-03-12T21:39:51Z","timestamp":1615585191000},"score":1,"resource":{"primary":{"URL":"https:\/\/direct.mit.edu\/tacl\/article\/97780"}},"subtitle":[],"short-title":[],"issued":{"date-parts":[[2021,2]]},"references-count":25,"alternative-id":["10.1162\/tacl_a_00354"],"URL":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1162\/tacl_a_00354","relation":{},"ISSN":["2307-387X"],"issn-type":[{"value":"2307-387X","type":"electronic"}],"subject":[],"published":{"date-parts":[[2021,2]]}}}