Matching Keys and Encrypted Manuscripts

Eva Pettersson, Beata Megyesi


Abstract
Historical cryptology is the study of historical encrypted messages aiming at their decryption by analyzing the mathematical, linguistic and other coding patterns and their historical context. In libraries and archives we can find quite a lot of ciphers, as well as keys describing the method used to transform the plaintext message into a ciphertext. In this paper, we present work on automatically mapping keys to ciphers to reconstruct the original plaintext message, and use language models generated from historical texts to guess the underlying plaintext language.
Anthology ID:
W19-6126
Volume:
Proceedings of the 22nd Nordic Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
September–October
Year:
2019
Address:
Turku, Finland
Editors:
Mareike Hartmann, Barbara Plank
Venue:
NoDaLiDa
SIG:
Publisher:
Linköping University Electronic Press
Note:
Pages:
253–261
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W19-6126
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Eva Pettersson and Beata Megyesi. 2019. Matching Keys and Encrypted Manuscripts. In Proceedings of the 22nd Nordic Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 253–261, Turku, Finland. Linköping University Electronic Press.
Cite (Informal):
Matching Keys and Encrypted Manuscripts (Pettersson & Megyesi, NoDaLiDa 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W19-6126.pdf