Halvtidsseminarium: Micaella Bruton, doktorand, Institutionen för lingvistik, Stockholms universitet

Abstract (engelska)

World archives contain thousands of historical documents written in cipher –diplomatic correspondence, religious texts, personal letters, and other manuscripts – many of which remain unread. Decrypting these texts is challenging not only cryptographically but also linguistically: orthographic variation across centuries, distorted symbol distributions, noisy transcriptions, and the scarcity of aligned plaintext–ciphertext data all complicate analysis.

In this talk, I present the first half of my doctoral work on applying neural methods to historical cipher decryption. I introduce ChronoFidelius, a Python library for generating historically grounded synthetic ciphertext, and HistCiph, a multilingual dataset of plaintext–ciphertext pairs spanning ten languages and eight centuries. Building on these resources, I present initial experiments with neural models for ciphertext–plaintext alignment and key extraction, deceipherment, and direct decryption, highlighting both their potential and current limitations.

Om Micaella Bruton