Kevin Knight
Information Scinece Institute
University of Southern California

"Language Translation and Code-Breaking"

 

Abstract

In 1949, Warren Weaver suggested applying cryptanalysis methods to the problem of automatic language translation.  He said: "When I look at an article in Russian, I say: this is really written in English, but it has been coded in some strange symbols. I will now proceed to decode".

Weaver's inspiration has borne fruit in this century, as statistical techniques have enabled us to build translation systems for many languages, with increasing accuracy.  But other fruitful connections between code-breaking and translation are only starting to emerge.  This talk will examine some: estimating the amount of data required to break a cipher, building translation systems without parallel data, and solving a previously-undeciphered manuscript from the 1730s.

Bio:

Kevin Knight is a Senior Research Scientist and Fellow at the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute, and a Research Professor in the Computer Science Department at USC.  He received a Ph.D. in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University and a bachelor's degree from Harvard University.  His research interests include natural language processing, statistical modeling, machine translation, language generation, and decipherment.  He currently serves as president of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

____________________________________________________________________________