We describe a first attempt at using techniques from computational linguistics to analyze the undeciphered proto-Elamite script. Using hierarchical clustering, n-gram frequencies, and LDA topic models, we both replicate results obtained by manual decipherment and reveal previously-unobserved relationships between signs. This demonstrates the utility of these techniques as an aid to manual decipherment.

We show that an epsilon-free, chain-free synchronous context-free grammar (SCFG) can be converted into a weakly equivalent synchronous tree-adjoining grammar (STAG) which is prefix lexicalized. This transformation at most doubles the grammar’s rank and cubes its size, but we show that in practice the size increase is only quadratic. Our results extend Greibach normal form from CFGs to SCFGs and prove new formal properties about SCFG, a formalism with many applications in natural language processing.