Decipherment of Lost Ancient Scripts as Combinatorial Optimisation using Coupled Simulated Annealing

Abstract

This paper presents a new approach to the ancient scripts decipherment problem based on combinatorial optimisation and coupled simulated annealing, an advanced non-convex optimisation procedure. Solutions are encoded by using k-permutations allowing for null, one-to-many, and many-to-one mappings between signs. The proposed system is able to produce enhanced results in cognate identification when compared to the state-of-the-art systems on standard evaluation benchmarks used in literature.