Unlocking the Secrets of Ancient Writing. The Parallel Lives of Michael Ventris and Linda Schele and the Decipherment of Mycenaean and Mayan Writing

Catalogue of an exhibition conducted in conjunction with the Eleventh International Mycenological Colloquium held at the University of Texas at Austin in 2000. This program features brief histories of the CIPEM Mycenological conferences and PASP, followed by comparative retrospectives on both Michael Ventris, who deciphered Linear B, and Linda Schele, who performed a similar feat for Mayan glyphs.Classic

Reified Context Models

A classic tension exists between exact inference in a simple model and approximate inference in a complex model. The latter offers expressivity and thus accuracy, but the former provides coverage of the space, an important property for confidence estimation and learning with indirect supervision. In this work, we introduce a new approach, reified context models, to reconcile this tension. Specifically, we let the amount of context (the arity of the factors in a graphical model) be chosen "at run-time" by reifying it---that is, letting this choice itself be a random variable inside the model. Empirically, we show that our approach obtains expressivity and coverage on three natural language tasks