@inproceedings{kambhatla-etal-2018-decipherment,
    title = "Decipherment of Substitution Ciphers with Neural Language Models",
    author = "Kambhatla, Nishant  and
      Mansouri Bigvand, Anahita  and
      Sarkar, Anoop",
    editor = "Riloff, Ellen  and
      Chiang, David  and
      Hockenmaier, Julia  and
      Tsujii, Jun{'}ichi",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing",
    month = oct # "-" # nov,
    year = "2018",
    address = "Brussels, Belgium",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/D18-1102/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/D18-1102",
    pages = "869--874",
    abstract = "Decipherment of homophonic substitution ciphers using language models is a well-studied task in NLP. Previous work in this topic scores short local spans of possible plaintext decipherments using n-gram language models. The most widely used technique is the use of beam search with n-gram language models proposed by Nuhn et al.(2013). We propose a beam search algorithm that scores the entire candidate plaintext at each step of the decipherment using a neural language model. We augment beam search with a novel rest cost estimation that exploits the prediction power of a neural language model. We compare against the state of the art n-gram based methods on many different decipherment tasks. On challenging ciphers such as the Beale cipher we provide significantly better error rates with much smaller beam sizes."
}