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Decipherment

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In philology , decipherment is the discovery of the meaning of the symbols found in extinct languages and/or alphabets .

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73-569: Decipherment overlaps with another technical field known as cryptanalysis , a field that aims to decipher writings used in secret communication, known as ciphertext . A famous case of this was in the cryptanalysis of the Enigma during the World War II . Many other ciphers from past wars have only recently been cracked. Unlike in language decipherment, however, actors using ciphertext intentionally lay obstacles to prevent outsiders from uncovering

146-504: A 9th-century Arab polymath , in Risalah fi Istikhraj al-Mu'amma ( A Manuscript on Deciphering Cryptographic Messages ). This treatise contains the first description of the method of frequency analysis . Al-Kindi is thus regarded as the first codebreaker in history. His breakthrough work was influenced by Al-Khalil (717–786), who wrote the Book of Cryptographic Messages , which contains

219-415: A PhD student at Brno University of Technology ) with co-authors applied a simple recurrent neural network with a single hidden layer to language modelling, and in the following years he went on to develop Word2vec . In the 2010s, representation learning and deep neural network -style (featuring many hidden layers) machine learning methods became widespread in natural language processing. That popularity

292-674: A breakthrough in factoring would impact the security of RSA. In 1980, one could factor a difficult 50-digit number at an expense of 10 elementary computer operations. By 1984 the state of the art in factoring algorithms had advanced to a point where a 75-digit number could be factored in 10 operations. Advances in computing technology also meant that the operations could be performed much faster. Moore's law predicts that computer speeds will continue to increase. Factoring techniques may continue to do so as well, but will most likely depend on mathematical insight and creativity, neither of which has ever been successfully predictable. 150-digit numbers of

365-454: A cipher failing to hide these statistics . For example, in a simple substitution cipher (where each letter is simply replaced with another), the most frequent letter in the ciphertext would be a likely candidate for "E". Frequency analysis of such a cipher is therefore relatively easy, provided that the ciphertext is long enough to give a reasonably representative count of the letters of the alphabet that it contains. Al-Kindi's invention of

438-522: A cipher simply means finding a weakness in the cipher that can be exploited with a complexity less than brute force. Never mind that brute-force might require 2 encryptions; an attack requiring 2 encryptions would be considered a break...simply put, a break can just be a certificational weakness: evidence that the cipher does not perform as advertised." The results of cryptanalysis can also vary in usefulness. Cryptographer Lars Knudsen (1998) classified various types of attack on block ciphers according to

511-421: A grouping of pictorial representations or a modern-day forgery without further meaning. This is commonly approached with methods from the field of grammatology . Prior to decipherment of meaning, one can then determine the number of distinct graphemes (which, in turn, allows one to tell if the writing system is alphabetic, syllabic, or logo-syllabic; this is because such writing systems typically do not overlap in

584-500: A large problem.) When a recovered plaintext is then combined with its ciphertext, the key is revealed: Knowledge of a key then allows the analyst to read other messages encrypted with the same key, and knowledge of a set of related keys may allow cryptanalysts to diagnose the system used for constructing them. Governments have long recognized the potential benefits of cryptanalysis for intelligence , both military and diplomatic, and established dedicated organizations devoted to breaking

657-413: A mature field." However, any postmortems for cryptanalysis may be premature. While the effectiveness of cryptanalytic methods employed by intelligence agencies remains unknown, many serious attacks against both academic and practical cryptographic primitives have been published in the modern era of computer cryptography: Thus, while the best modern ciphers may be far more resistant to cryptanalysis than

730-555: A program. With reciprocal machine ciphers such as the Lorenz cipher and the Enigma machine used by Nazi Germany during World War II , each message had its own key. Usually, the transmitting operator informed the receiving operator of this message key by transmitting some plaintext and/or ciphertext before the enciphered message. This is termed the indicator , as it indicates to the receiving operator how to set his machine to decipher

803-411: A quantum computer, brute-force key search can be made quadratically faster. However, this could be countered by doubling the key length. Natural language processing Natural language processing ( NLP ) is a subfield of computer science and especially artificial intelligence . It is primarily concerned with providing computers with the ability to process data encoded in natural language and

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876-475: A reduced-round block cipher, as a step towards breaking the full system. Cryptanalysis has coevolved together with cryptography, and the contest can be traced through the history of cryptography —new ciphers being designed to replace old broken designs, and new cryptanalytic techniques invented to crack the improved schemes. In practice, they are viewed as two sides of the same coin: secure cryptography requires design against possible cryptanalysis. Although

949-496: A set of messages. For example, the Vernam cipher enciphers by bit-for-bit combining plaintext with a long key using the " exclusive or " operator, which is also known as " modulo-2 addition " (symbolized by ⊕ ): Deciphering combines the same key bits with the ciphertext to reconstruct the plaintext: (In modulo-2 arithmetic, addition is the same as subtraction.) When two such ciphertexts are aligned in depth, combining them eliminates

1022-421: A similar assessment about Ultra, saying that it shortened the war "by not less than two years and probably by four years"; moreover, he said that in the absence of Ultra, it is uncertain how the war would have ended. In practice, frequency analysis relies as much on linguistic knowledge as it does on statistics, but as ciphers became more complex, mathematics became more important in cryptanalysis. This change

1095-469: Is for a third party, a cryptanalyst , to gain as much information as possible about the original ( " plaintext " ), attempting to "break" the encryption to read the ciphertext and learning the secret key so future messages can be decrypted and read. A mathematical technique to do this is called a cryptographic attack . Cryptographic attacks can be characterized in a number of ways: Cryptanalytical attacks can be classified based on what type of information

1168-493: Is given below. Based on long-standing trends in the field, it is possible to extrapolate future directions of NLP. As of 2020, three trends among the topics of the long-standing series of CoNLL Shared Tasks can be observed: Most higher-level NLP applications involve aspects that emulate intelligent behaviour and apparent comprehension of natural language. More broadly speaking, the technical operationalization of increasingly advanced aspects of cognitive behaviour represents one of

1241-555: Is more common, and includes things such as the detection of cognates or related words, discovery of the closest known language, word alignments, and more. In recent years, there has been a growing emphasis on methods utilizing artificial intelligence for the decipherment of lost languages, especially through natural language processing (NLP) methods. Proof-of-concept methods have independently re-deciphered Ugaritic and Linear B using data from similar languages, in this case Hebrew and Ancient Greek . Related to attempts to decipher

1314-441: Is that, unlike attacks on symmetric cryptosystems, any cryptanalysis has the opportunity to make use of knowledge gained from the public key . Quantum computers , which are still in the early phases of research, have potential use in cryptanalysis. For example, Shor's Algorithm could factor large numbers in polynomial time , in effect breaking some commonly used forms of public-key encryption. By using Grover's algorithm on

1387-504: Is thus closely related to information retrieval , knowledge representation and computational linguistics , a subfield of linguistics . Typically data is collected in text corpora , using either rule-based, statistical or neural-based approaches in machine learning and deep learning . Major tasks in natural language processing are speech recognition , text classification , natural-language understanding , and natural-language generation . Natural language processing has its roots in

1460-409: Is well-summarized by John Searle 's Chinese room experiment: Given a collection of rules (e.g., a Chinese phrasebook, with questions and matching answers), the computer emulates natural language understanding (or other NLP tasks) by applying those rules to the data it confronts. Up until the 1980s, most natural language processing systems were based on complex sets of hand-written rules. Starting in

1533-421: The " plaintext " ) is sent securely to a recipient by the sender first converting it into an unreadable form ( " ciphertext " ) using an encryption algorithm . The ciphertext is sent through an insecure channel to the recipient. The recipient decrypts the ciphertext by applying an inverse decryption algorithm , recovering the plaintext. To decrypt the ciphertext, the recipient requires a secret knowledge from

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1606-504: The ACL ). More recently, ideas of cognitive NLP have been revived as an approach to achieve explainability , e.g., under the notion of "cognitive AI". Likewise, ideas of cognitive NLP are inherent to neural models multimodal NLP (although rarely made explicit) and developments in artificial intelligence , specifically tools and technologies using large language model approaches and new directions in artificial general intelligence based on

1679-416: The Enigma , cryptanalysis and the broader field of information security remain quite active. Asymmetric cryptography (or public-key cryptography ) is cryptography that relies on using two (mathematically related) keys; one private, and one public. Such ciphers invariably rely on "hard" mathematical problems as the basis of their security, so an obvious point of attack is to develop methods for solving

1752-483: The Greek kryptós , "hidden", and analýein , "to analyze") refers to the process of analyzing information systems in order to understand hidden aspects of the systems. Cryptanalysis is used to breach cryptographic security systems and gain access to the contents of encrypted messages, even if the cryptographic key is unknown. In addition to mathematical analysis of cryptographic algorithms, cryptanalysis includes

1825-543: The Vigenère cipher , which uses a repeating key to select different encryption alphabets in rotation, was considered to be completely secure ( le chiffre indéchiffrable —"the indecipherable cipher"). Nevertheless, Charles Babbage (1791–1871) and later, independently, Friedrich Kasiski (1805–81) succeeded in breaking this cipher. During World War I , inventors in several countries developed rotor cipher machines such as Arthur Scherbius ' Enigma , in an attempt to minimise

1898-486: The 1950s. Already in 1950, Alan Turing published an article titled " Computing Machinery and Intelligence " which proposed what is now called the Turing test as a criterion of intelligence, though at the time that was not articulated as a problem separate from artificial intelligence. The proposed test includes a task that involves the automated interpretation and generation of natural language. The premise of symbolic NLP

1971-736: The German Lorenz cipher and the Japanese Purple code , and a variety of classical schemes): Attacks can also be characterised by the resources they require. Those resources include: It is sometimes difficult to predict these quantities precisely, especially when the attack is not practical to actually implement for testing. But academic cryptanalysts tend to provide at least the estimated order of magnitude of their attacks' difficulty, saying, for example, "SHA-1 collisions now 2 ." Bruce Schneier notes that even computationally impractical attacks can be considered breaks: "Breaking

2044-545: The actual word " cryptanalysis " is relatively recent (it was coined by William Friedman in 1920), methods for breaking codes and ciphers are much older. David Kahn notes in The Codebreakers that Arab scholars were the first people to systematically document cryptanalytic methods. The first known recorded explanation of cryptanalysis was given by Al-Kindi (c. 801–873, also known as "Alkindus" in Europe),

2117-460: The advance of LLMs in 2023. Before that they were commonly used: In the late 1980s and mid-1990s, the statistical approach ended a period of AI winter , which was caused by the inefficiencies of the rule-based approaches. The earliest decision trees , producing systems of hard if–then rules , were still very similar to the old rule-based approaches. Only the introduction of hidden Markov models , applied to part-of-speech tagging, announced

2190-472: The age of symbolic NLP , the area of computational linguistics maintained strong ties with cognitive studies. As an example, George Lakoff offers a methodology to build natural language processing (NLP) algorithms through the perspective of cognitive science, along with the findings of cognitive linguistics, with two defining aspects: Ties with cognitive linguistics are part of the historical heritage of NLP, but they have been less frequently addressed since

2263-476: The amount and quality of secret information that was discovered: Academic attacks are often against weakened versions of a cryptosystem, such as a block cipher or hash function with some rounds removed. Many, but not all, attacks become exponentially more difficult to execute as rounds are added to a cryptosystem, so it's possible for the full cryptosystem to be strong even though reduced-round variants are weak. Nonetheless, partial breaks that come close to breaking

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2336-510: The application of such statistical methods becomes exceedingly laborious, in which computers might be used to apply them automatically. Computational approaches towards the decipherment of unknown languages began to appear in the late 1990s. Typically, there are two types of computational approaches used in language decipherment: approaches meant to produce translations in known languages, and approaches used to detect new information that might enable future efforts at translation. The second approach

2409-553: The attacker has available. As a basic starting point it is normally assumed that, for the purposes of analysis, the general algorithm is known; this is Shannon's Maxim "the enemy knows the system" – in its turn, equivalent to Kerckhoffs's principle . This is a reasonable assumption in practice – throughout history, there are countless examples of secret algorithms falling into wider knowledge, variously through espionage , betrayal and reverse engineering . (And on occasion, ciphers have been broken through pure deduction; for example,

2482-411: The attacker may need to choose particular plaintexts to be encrypted or even to ask for plaintexts to be encrypted using several keys related to the secret key . Furthermore, it might only reveal a small amount of information, enough to prove the cryptosystem imperfect but too little to be useful to real-world attackers. Finally, an attack might only apply to a weakened version of cryptographic tools, like

2555-445: The cipher machine. Sending two or more messages with the same key is an insecure process. To a cryptanalyst the messages are then said to be "in depth." This may be detected by the messages having the same indicator by which the sending operator informs the receiving operator about the key generator initial settings for the message. Generally, the cryptanalyst may benefit from lining up identical enciphering operations among

2628-553: The codes and ciphers of other nations, for example, GCHQ and the NSA , organizations which are still very active today. Even though computation was used to great effect in the cryptanalysis of the Lorenz cipher and other systems during World War II, it also made possible new methods of cryptography orders of magnitude more complex than ever before. Taken as a whole, modern cryptography has become much more impervious to cryptanalysis than

2701-449: The common key, leaving just a combination of the two plaintexts: The individual plaintexts can then be worked out linguistically by trying probable words (or phrases), also known as "cribs," at various locations; a correct guess, when combined with the merged plaintext stream, produces intelligible text from the other plaintext component: The recovered fragment of the second plaintext can often be extended in one or both directions, and

2774-480: The developmental trajectories of NLP (see trends among CoNLL shared tasks above). Cognition refers to "the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses." Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary, scientific study of the mind and its processes. Cognitive linguistics is an interdisciplinary branch of linguistics, combining knowledge and research from both psychology and linguistics. Especially during

2847-497: The discovery of external information, a common example being through the use of multilingual inscriptions , such as the Rosetta Stone (with the same text in three scripts: Demotic , hieroglyphic , and Greek ) that enabled the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphic. In principle, multilingual text may be insufficient for a decipherment as translation is not a linear and reversible process, but instead represents an encoding of

2920-755: The end of the European war by up to two years, to determining the eventual result. The war in the Pacific was similarly helped by 'Magic' intelligence. Cryptanalysis of enemy messages played a significant part in the Allied victory in World War II. F. W. Winterbotham , quoted the western Supreme Allied Commander, Dwight D. Eisenhower , at the war's end as describing Ultra intelligence as having been "decisive" to Allied victory. Sir Harry Hinsley , official historian of British Intelligence in World War II, made

2993-533: The end of the old rule-based approach. A major drawback of statistical methods is that they require elaborate feature engineering . Since 2015, the statistical approach has been replaced by the neural networks approach, using semantic networks and word embeddings to capture semantic properties of words. Intermediate tasks (e.g., part-of-speech tagging and dependency parsing) are not needed anymore. Neural machine translation , based on then-newly-invented sequence-to-sequence transformations, made obsolete

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3066-401: The extra characters can be combined with the merged plaintext stream to extend the first plaintext. Working back and forth between the two plaintexts, using the intelligibility criterion to check guesses, the analyst may recover much or all of the original plaintexts. (With only two plaintexts in depth, the analyst may not know which one corresponds to which ciphertext, but in practice this is not

3139-590: The first use of permutations and combinations to list all possible Arabic words with and without vowels. Frequency analysis is the basic tool for breaking most classical ciphers . In natural languages, certain letters of the alphabet appear more often than others; in English , " E " is likely to be the most common letter in any sample of plaintext . Similarly, the digraph "TH" is the most likely pair of letters in English, and so on. Frequency analysis relies on

3212-489: The following comment about the letter <o>: "In the long time it naturally soundeth sharp, and high; as in chósen, hósen, hóly, fólly [. . .] In the short time more flat, and a kin to u; as còsen, dòsen, mòther, bròther, lòve, pròve". Another example comes from detailed comments on pronunciations of Sanskrit from the surviving works of Sanskrit grammarians. Many challenges exist in the decipherment of languages, including when: Cryptanalysis Cryptanalysis (from

3285-677: The frequency analysis technique for breaking monoalphabetic substitution ciphers was the most significant cryptanalytic advance until World War II. Al-Kindi's Risalah fi Istikhraj al-Mu'amma described the first cryptanalytic techniques, including some for polyalphabetic ciphers , cipher classification, Arabic phonetics and syntax, and most importantly, gave the first descriptions on frequency analysis. He also covered methods of encipherments, cryptanalysis of certain encipherments, and statistical analysis of letters and letter combinations in Arabic. An important contribution of Ibn Adlan (1187–1268)

3358-530: The hand-coding of a set of rules for manipulating symbols, coupled with a dictionary lookup, was historically the first approach used both by AI in general and by NLP in particular: such as by writing grammars or devising heuristic rules for stemming . Machine learning approaches, which include both statistical and neural networks, on the other hand, have many advantages over the symbolic approach: Although rule-based systems for manipulating symbols were still in use in 2020, they have become mostly obsolete with

3431-501: The intermediate steps, such as word alignment, previously necessary for statistical machine translation . The following is a list of some of the most commonly researched tasks in natural language processing. Some of these tasks have direct real-world applications, while others more commonly serve as subtasks that are used to aid in solving larger tasks. Though natural language processing tasks are closely intertwined, they can be subdivided into categories for convenience. A coarse division

3504-539: The key that unlock[s] other messages. In a sense, then, cryptanalysis is dead. But that is not the end of the story. Cryptanalysis may be dead, but there is – to mix my metaphors – more than one way to skin a cat. Kahn goes on to mention increased opportunities for interception, bugging , side channel attacks , and quantum computers as replacements for the traditional means of cryptanalysis. In 2010, former NSA technical director Brian Snow said that both academic and government cryptographers are "moving very slowly forward in

3577-594: The kind once used in RSA have been factored. The effort was greater than above, but was not unreasonable on fast modern computers. By the start of the 21st century, 150-digit numbers were no longer considered a large enough key size for RSA. Numbers with several hundred digits were still considered too hard to factor in 2005, though methods will probably continue to improve over time, requiring key size to keep pace or other methods such as elliptic curve cryptography to be used. Another distinguishing feature of asymmetric schemes

3650-455: The last line of a text has a small number, it can be reasonably guessed to be referring to the date, where one of the words means "year" and, sometimes, a royal name also appears. Another case is when the text contains many small numbers, followed by a word, followed by a larger number; here, the word likely means "total" or "sum". After one has exhausted the information that can be inferentially derived from probable content, they must transition to

3723-404: The late 1980s, however, there was a revolution in natural language processing with the introduction of machine learning algorithms for language processing. This was due to both the steady increase in computational power (see Moore's law ) and the gradual lessening of the dominance of Chomskyan theories of linguistics (e.g. transformational grammar ), whose theoretical underpinnings discouraged

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3796-603: The meaning of languages and alphabets, include attempts to decipher how extinct writing systems, or older versions of contemporary writing systems (such as English in the 1600s) were pronounced. Several methods and criteria have been developed in this regard. Important criteria include (1) Rhymes and the testimony of poetry (2) Evidence from occasional spellings and misspellings (3) Interpretations of material in one language from authors in foreign languags (4) Information obtained from related languages (5) Grammatical changes in spelling over time. For example, analysis of poetry focuses on

3869-595: The meaning of the communication system. Today, at least a dozen languages remain undeciphered. A notable recent decipherment was that of the Linear Elamite script. According to Gelb and Whiting, the approach of decipherment depends on four categories of situations in an undeciphered language: A number of methods are available to go about deciphering an extinct writing system or language. These can be divided into approaches utilizing external or internal information. Many successful encipherments have proceeded from

3942-465: The message in a different symbolic system. Translating a text from one language into a second, and then from the second language back into the first, rarely reproduces exactly the original writing. Likewise, unless a significant number of words are contained in the multilingual text, limited information can be gleaned from it. Internal approaches are multi-step: one must first ensure that the writing they are looking at represents real writing, as opposed to

4015-531: The message. Poorly designed and implemented indicator systems allowed first Polish cryptographers and then the British cryptographers at Bletchley Park to break the Enigma cipher system. Similar poor indicator systems allowed the British to identify depths that led to the diagnosis of the Lorenz SZ40/42 cipher system, and the comprehensive breaking of its messages without the cryptanalysts seeing

4088-406: The number of graphemes they use), the sequence of writing (whether it be from left to right, right to left, top to bottom, etc.), and the determination of whether individual words are properly segmented when the alphabet is written (such as with the use of a space or a different special mark) or not. If a repetitive schematic arrangement can be identified, this can help in decipherment. For example, if

4161-452: The original cryptosystem may mean that a full break will follow; the successful attacks on DES , MD5 , and SHA-1 were all preceded by attacks on weakened versions. In academic cryptography, a weakness or a break in a scheme is usually defined quite conservatively: it might require impractical amounts of time, memory, or known plaintexts. It also might require the attacker be able to do things many real-world attackers can't: for example,

4234-468: The past, through machines like the British Bombes and Colossus computers at Bletchley Park in World War II , to the mathematically advanced computerized schemes of the present. Methods for breaking modern cryptosystems often involve solving carefully constructed problems in pure mathematics , the best-known being integer factorization . In encryption , confidential information (called

4307-417: The pen-and-paper systems of the past, and now seems to have the upper hand against pure cryptanalysis. The historian David Kahn notes: Many are the cryptosystems offered by the hundreds of commercial vendors today that cannot be broken by any known methods of cryptanalysis. Indeed, in such systems even a chosen plaintext attack , in which a selected plaintext is matched against its ciphertext, cannot yield

4380-399: The problem. The security of two-key cryptography depends on mathematical questions in a way that single-key cryptography generally does not, and conversely links cryptanalysis to wider mathematical research in a new way. Asymmetric schemes are designed around the (conjectured) difficulty of solving various mathematical problems. If an improved algorithm can be found to solve the problem, then

4453-795: The repetition that had been exploited to break the Vigenère system. In World War I , the breaking of the Zimmermann Telegram was instrumental in bringing the United States into the war. In World War II , the Allies benefitted enormously from their joint success cryptanalysis of the German ciphers – including the Enigma machine and the Lorenz cipher – and Japanese ciphers, particularly 'Purple' and JN-25 . 'Ultra' intelligence has been credited with everything between shortening

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4526-498: The sender, usually a string of letters, numbers, or bits , called a cryptographic key . The concept is that even if an unauthorized person gets access to the ciphertext during transmission, without the secret key they cannot convert it back to plaintext. Encryption has been used throughout history to send important military, diplomatic and commercial messages, and today is very widely used in computer networking to protect email and internet communication. The goal of cryptanalysis

4599-500: The similar or the same sound. This method does have some limitations however, as texts may use rhymes that rely on visual similarities between words (such as 'love' and 'remove') as opposed to auditory similarities, and that rhymes can be imperfect . Another source of information about pronunciation comes from explicit description of pronunciations from earlier texts, as in the case of the Grammatica Anglicana , such as in

4672-442: The sort of corpus linguistics that underlies the machine-learning approach to language processing. In 2003, word n-gram model , at the time the best statistical algorithm, was outperformed by a multi-layer perceptron (with a single hidden layer and context length of several words trained on up to 14 million of words with a CPU cluster in language modelling ) by Yoshua Bengio with co-authors. In 2010, Tomáš Mikolov (then

4745-442: The statistical turn during the 1990s. Nevertheless, approaches to develop cognitive models towards technically operationalizable frameworks have been pursued in the context of various frameworks, e.g., of cognitive grammar, functional grammar, construction grammar, computational psycholinguistics and cognitive neuroscience (e.g., ACT-R ), however, with limited uptake in mainstream NLP (as measured by presence on major conferences of

4818-404: The study of side-channel attacks that do not target weaknesses in the cryptographic algorithms themselves, but instead exploit weaknesses in their implementation. Even though the goal has been the same, the methods and techniques of cryptanalysis have changed drastically through the history of cryptography, adapting to increasing cryptographic complexity, ranging from the pen-and-paper methods of

4891-485: The system is weakened. For example, the security of the Diffie–Hellman key exchange scheme depends on the difficulty of calculating the discrete logarithm . In 1983, Don Coppersmith found a faster way to find discrete logarithms (in certain groups), and thereby requiring cryptographers to use larger groups (or different types of groups). RSA 's security depends (in part) upon the difficulty of integer factorization –

4964-545: The systematic application of statistical tools. These include methods concerning the frequency of appearance of each symbol, the order in which these symbols typically appear, whether some symbols appear at the beginning or end of words, etc. There are situations where orthographic features of a language make it difficult if not impossible to decipher specific features (especially without certain outside information), such as when an alphabet does not express double consonants. Additional, and more complex methods, also exist. Eventually,

5037-520: The use of wordplay or literary techniques between words that have a similar sound. Shakespeare 's play Romeo and Juliet contains wordplay that relies on a similar sound between the words "soul" and "soles", allowing confidence that the similar pronunciation between the terms today also existed in Shakespeare's time. Another common source of information on pronunciation is when earlier texts use rhyme , such as when consecutive lines in poetry end in

5110-446: Was due partly to a flurry of results showing that such techniques can achieve state-of-the-art results in many natural language tasks, e.g., in language modeling and parsing. This is increasingly important in medicine and healthcare , where NLP helps analyze notes and text in electronic health records that would otherwise be inaccessible for study when seeking to improve care or protect patient privacy. Symbolic approach, i.e.,

5183-478: Was on sample size for use of frequency analysis. In Europe, Italian scholar Giambattista della Porta (1535–1615) was the author of a seminal work on cryptanalysis, De Furtivis Literarum Notis . Successful cryptanalysis has undoubtedly influenced history; the ability to read the presumed-secret thoughts and plans of others can be a decisive advantage. For example, in England in 1587, Mary, Queen of Scots

5256-578: Was particularly evident before and during World War II , where efforts to crack Axis ciphers required new levels of mathematical sophistication. Moreover, automation was first applied to cryptanalysis in that era with the Polish Bomba device, the British Bombe , the use of punched card equipment, and in the Colossus computers – the first electronic digital computers to be controlled by

5329-503: Was tried and executed for treason as a result of her involvement in three plots to assassinate Elizabeth I of England . The plans came to light after her coded correspondence with fellow conspirators was deciphered by Thomas Phelippes . In Europe during the 15th and 16th centuries, the idea of a polyalphabetic substitution cipher was developed, among others by the French diplomat Blaise de Vigenère (1523–96). For some three centuries,

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