Séminaire Linguistique Informatique
24 Septembre 2008
Gerlad PENN (University of Toronto).
TITRE: The
Quantitative Study of Writing Systems
If you understood all of
the world's languages, you would still not be able to read many of the
texts that you find on the world wide web, because they are written in
non-Roman scripts -- often ones that have been arbitrarily encoded for
electronic transmission in the absence of an accepted standard.
This very modern nuisance reflects a dilemma as ancient as writing
itself: the association between a language as it is spoken and its
written form has a sort of internal logic to it that we can comprehend,
but the conventions are different in every individual case --- even
among languages that use the same script, or between scripts used by
the same language. This conventional association between language
and script, called a {\it writing system}, is indeed reminiscent of the
Saussurean conception of language itself, a conventional association of
meaning and sound, upon which modern linguistic theory is based.
Despite linguists' reliance upon writing to present and preserve
linguistic data, however, writing systems were a largely forgotten
corner of linguistics until the 1960s, when Gelb presented their first
classification.
This talk will describe recent work that aims to place the study of
writing systems upon a sound computational and statistical foundation.
While archaeological decipherment may eternally remain the holy grail
of this area of research, it also has applications to speech synthesis,
machine translation, and multilingual document retrieval.