Network analysis of a corpus of undeciphered Indus civilization inscriptions indicates syntactic organization

Autor:	Sinha, Sitabhra, Ashraf, Md Izhar, Pan, Raj Kumar, Wells, Bryan Kenneth
Rok vydání:	2010
Předmět:	Computer Science - Computation and Language Physics - Data Analysis Statistics and Probability Physics - Physics and Society
Zdroj:	Computer Speech and Language, 25 (2011) 639-654
Druh dokumentu:	Working Paper
DOI:	10.1016/j.csl.2010.05.007
Popis:	Archaeological excavations in the sites of the Indus Valley civilization (2500-1900 BCE) in Pakistan and northwestern India have unearthed a large number of artifacts with inscriptions made up of hundreds of distinct signs. To date there is no generally accepted decipherment of these sign sequences and there have been suggestions that the signs could be non-linguistic. Here we apply complex network analysis techniques to a database of available Indus inscriptions, with the aim of detecting patterns indicative of syntactic organization. Our results show the presence of patterns, e.g., recursive structures in the segmentation trees of the sequences, that suggest the existence of a grammar underlying these inscriptions. Comment: 17 pages (includes 4 page appendix containing Indus sign list), 14 figures
Databáze:	arXiv
Externí odkaz:	http://arxiv.org/abs/1005.4997 Zobrazit plný text záznamu View this record from Arxiv