SFU Decipherment class: Syllabus

The Voynich manuscript. As yet unread.

Date	Topic	Readings/Videos/In-class exercises (=optional)
Jan 06	Course introduction	Babylonian numbers Breaking the Maya Code (PBS Nova)
Jan 08	ACL 2013 Tutorial on Decipherment by Kevin Knight	Intelligent Machinery (Alan Turing)
Jan 13	ACL 2013 Tutorial on Decipherment by Kevin Knight	Lost in Yerevan (Dragomir Radev) Richard Sproat on Charles Bliss (WNYC New Tech City)
Jan 15	CS Distinguished Lecture series	2015 DLS series
Jan 20	Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems	Korean shopping list (Anoop Sarkar) Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems (C. E. Shannon)
Jan 22	Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems	Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems (C. E. Shannon)
Jan 27	Language models and decipherment	Natural Language Corpus Data (Peter Norvig) The Philistines were almost certainly Canadian (Josh Tyra)
Jan 29	The EM algorithm	The Philae Obelisk (Anoop Sarkar) A Computational Approach to Deciphering Unknown Scripts (K. Knight and K. Yamada) Demo of the Knight and Yamada (1999) paper (K. Knight and K. Yamada)
Feb 03	The EM algorithm	Luwian (A. Zhurinsky) The Naive Bayes Model, Maximum-Likelihood Estimation, and the EM Algorithm (Michael Collins)
Feb 05	Homework 1	The Naive Bayes Model, Maximum-Likelihood Estimation, and the EM Algorithm (Michael Collins) The EM algorithm (Michael Collins)
Feb 17	Dynamic programming for EM; Unsupervised learning with features	Hidden Markov Models (Michael Collins) Phoenician Fun (Harold Somers) Painless Unsupervised Learning with Features (Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick and Alexandre Bouchard-Côté and John DeNero and Dan Klein)
Feb 19	CS Distinguished Lecture series	2015 DLS series
Feb 24	Non-parameteric Bayesian inference	Bayesian Inference with Tears (Kevin Knight) Gibbs sampling for the uninitiated (Philip Resnik and Eric Hardisty)
Mar 03	Non-parameteric Bayesian inference	Bayesian Inference with Tears (Kevin Knight)
Mar 03	Bayesian decipherment	Bardi (Catherine Sheard)
Mar 10	EM and decipherment	Linear Combinations (Richard Sproat) Unsupervised Analysis for Decipherment Problems (K. Knight and A. Nair and N. Rathod and K. Yamada) Probabilistic Methods for a Japanese Syllable Cipher (S. Ravi and K. Knight)
Mar 12	Search and decipherment Presentation by Karol	Attacking Decipherment Problems Optimally with Low-Order N-gram Models (S. Ravi and K. Knight) An Exact A* Method for Deciphering Letter-Substitution Ciphers (E. Corlett and G. Penn)
Mar 17	Search and decipherment	Solving Substitution Ciphers with Combined Language Models (Bradley Hauer and Ryan Hayward and Greg Kondrak)
Mar 19	Bayesian decipherment and Ugaritic	A Statistical Model for Lost Language Decipherment (B. Snyder and R. Barzilay and K. Knight) They cracked this 250-year old code, and found a secret society inside (Noah Shachtman, Wired magazine)
Mar 24	Homophonic ciphers Presentation by Ramtin	Bayesian Inference for Zodiac and Other Homophonic Ciphers (S. Ravi and K. Knight) EM Decipherment for Large Vocabularies (Malte Nuhn and Hermann Ney) Simple Effective Decipherment via Combinatorial Optimization (T. Berg-Kirkpatrick and D. Klein) Decipherment with a Million Random Restarts (Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick and Dan Klein) Zodiac (David Fincher)
Mar 26	No class: Distinguished Lecture
Mar 31	Decipherment and Machine Translation Presentation by Mehdi+Zhelun	Large Scale Decipherment for Out-of-Domain Machine Translation (Qing Dou and Kevin Knight) Dependency-Based Decipherment for Resource-Limited Machine Translation (Qing Dou and Kevin Knight) Beyond Parallel Data: Joint Word Alignment and Decipherment Improves Machine Translation (Qing Dou and Ashish Vaswani and Kevin Knight)
Apr 02	Cipher Type Detection Presentation by Hassan+Jasneet	Cipher Type Detection (Malte Nuhn and Kevin Knight) Decoding Running Key Ciphers (Sravana Reddy and Kevin Knight)
Apr 07	Beam search for decipherment Presentation by Anahita+Golnar	Beam Search for Solving Substitution Ciphers (M. Nuhn, J. Schamper, and H. Ney) Deciphering Foreign Language by Combining Language Models and Context Vectors (M. Nuhn and A. Mauser and H. Ney) Decipherment Complexity in 1:1 Substitution Ciphers (M. Nuhn, and H. Ney)
Apr 09	Unsupervised multilingual text to speech	Unsupervised Consonant-Vowel Prediction over Hundreds of Languages (Y. Kim and B. Snyder) Universal Grapheme to Phoneme Prediction over Latin Alphabets (Young-Bum Kim and Benjamin Snyder)
Apr 14	Final project presentations