Computational Linguistics Techniques for the Study of Ancient Languages

This paper presents a grammatical comparison of the Minoan language with the proto-Ugric and proto- Hungarian languages. Recent research showed that these languages are closely related, but this paper presents a novel grammatical comparison. The grammatical comparison shows the Minoan language to have an agglutinative type of grammar, with a CVCV type root word structure. The Minoan language also features assimilation between the word roots and the suffixes and a possessive phrase structure that is similar to that in Hungarian

A Translation of the Malia Altar Stone

This paper presents a translation of the Malia Altar Stone inscription (CHIC 328), which is one of the longest known Cretan Hieroglyph inscriptions. The translation uses a synoptic transliteration to several scripts that are related to the Malia Altar Stone script. The synoptic transliteration strengthens the derived phonetic values and allows avoiding certain errors that would result from reliance on just a single transliteration. The synoptic transliteration is similar to a multiple alignment of related genomes in bioinformatics in order to derive the genetic sequence of a putative common ancestor of all the aligned genomes

The Cretan Script Family Includes the Carian Alphabet

The Cretan Script Family is a set of related writing systems that have a putative origin in Crete. Recently, Revesz [11] identified the Cretan Hieroglyphs, Linear A, Linear B, the Cypriot syllabary, and the Greek, Old Hungarian, Phoenician, South Arabic and Tifinagh alphabets as members of this script family and using bioinformatics algorithms gave a hypothetical evolutionary tree for their development and presented a map for their likely spread in the Mediterranean and Black Sea areas. The evolutionary tree and the map indicated some unknown writing system in western Anatolia to be the common origin of the Cypriot syllabary and the Old Hungarian alphabet. This paper argues that the missing link may be some ancestor of the Carian alphabet because several Carian alphabet letters show an intermediate stage between the corresponding Cypriot syllabary signs and the Old Hungarian letters

A Dynamic Data Structure to Efficiently Find the Points below a Line and Estimate Their Number

A basic question in computational geometry is how to find the relationship between a set of points and a line in a real plane. In this paper, we present multidimensional data structures for N points that allow answering the following queries for any given input line: (1) estimate in O(log N) time the number of points below the line; (2) return in O(log N + k) time the k ≤ N points that are below the line; and (3) return in O(log N) time the point that is closest to the line. We illustrate the utility of this computational question with GIS applications in air defense and traffic control

Cubic Spline Interpolation Reveals Different Evolutionary Trends of Various Species

Instead of being uniform in each branch of the biological evolutionary tree, the speed of evolution, measured in the number of mutations over a fixed number of years, seems to be much faster or much slower than average in some branches of the evolutionary tree. This paper describes an evolutionary trend discovery algorithm that uses cubic spline interpolation for various branches of the evolutionary tree. As shown in an example, within the vertebrate evolutionary tree, human evolution seems to be currently speeding up while the evolution of chickens is slowing down. The new algorithm can automatically identify those branches and times when something unusual has taken place, aiding data analytics of evolutionary data

Convolutional Neural Networks Analysis Reveals Three Possible Sources of Bronze Age Writings between Greece and India

This paper analyzes the relationships among eight ancient scripts from between Greece and India. We used convolutional neural networks combined with support vector machines to give a numerical rating of the similarity between pairs of signs (one sign from each of two different scripts). Two scripts that had a one-to-one matching of their signs were determined to be related. The result of the analysis is the finding of the following three groups, which are listed in chronological order: (1) Sumerian pictograms, the Indus Valley script, and the proto-Elamite script; (2) Cretan hieroglyphs and Linear B; and (3) the Phoenician, Greek, and Brahmi alphabets. Based on their geographic locations and times of appearance, Group (1) may originate from Mesopotamia in the early Bronze Age, Group (2) may originate from Europe in the middle Bronze Age, and Group (3) may originate from the Sinai Peninsula in the late Bronze Age

On the relationship of congruence closureand unification

Congruence closure is a fundamental operation for symbolic computation. Unification closureis defined as its directional dual, i.e., on the same inputs but top-down as opposed to bottom-up. Unifying terms is another fundamental operation for symbolic computation and is commonly computed using unification closure. We clarify the directional duality by reducing unification closure to a special form of congruence closure. This reduction reveals a correspondence between repeated variables in terms to be unified and equalities of monadic ground terms. We then show that: (1) single equality congruence closure on a directed acyclic graph, and (2) acyclic congruence closure of a fixed number of equalities, are in the parallel complexity class NC. The directional dual unification closures in these two cases are known to be log-space complete for PTIME. As a consequence of our reductions we show that if the number of repeated variables in the input terms is fixed, then term unification can be performed in NC; this extends the known parallelizable cases of term unification. Using parallel complexity we also clarify the relationship of unification closure and the testing of deterministic finite automata for equivalence

Affine-Invariant Triangulation of Spatio-Temporal Data with an Application to Image Retrieval

In the geometric data model for spatio-temporal data, introduced by Chomicki and Revesz , spatio-temporal data are modelled as a finite collection of triangles that are transformed by time-dependent affinities of the plane. To facilitate querying and animation of spatio-temporal data, we present a normal form for data in the geometric data model. We propose an algorithm for constructing this normal form via a spatio-temporal triangulation of geometric data objects. This triangulation algorithm generates new geometric data objects that partition the given objects both in space and in time. A particular property of the proposed partition is that it is invariant under time-dependent affine transformations, and hence independent of the particular choice of coordinate system used to describe the spatio-temporal data in. We can show that our algorithm works correctly and has a polynomial time complexity (of reasonably low degree in the number of input triangles and the maximal degree of the polynomial functions that describe the transformation functions). We also discuss several possible applications of this spatio-temporal triangulation. The application of our affine-invariant spatial triangulation method to image indexing and retrieval is discussed and an experimental evaluation is given in the context of bird images

FAST-NMR - Functional Annotation Screening Technology Using NMR Spectroscopy

An abundance of protein structures emerging from structural genomics and the Protein Structure Initiative (PSI) are not amenable to ready functional assignment because of a lack of sequence and structural homology to proteins of known function. We describe a high-throughput NMR methodology (FAST-NMR) to annotate the biological function of novel proteins through the structural and sequence analysis of protein-ligand interactions. This is based on basic tenets of biochemistry where proteins with similar functions will have similar active sites and exhibit similar ligand binding interactions, despite global differences in sequence and structure. Protein-ligand interactions are determined through a tiered NMR screen using a library composed of compounds with known biological activity. A rapid co-structure is determined by combining the experimental identification of the ligand-binding site from NMR chemical shift perturbations with the proteinligand docking program AutoDock. Our CPASS (Comparison of Protein Active Site Structures) software and database is then used to compare this active site with proteins of known function. The methodology is demonstrated using unannotated protein SAV1430 from Staphylococcus aureus