[Article] Decoding Anagrammed Texts Written in an Unknown Language and Script

[MarcoP]

That's still nonsense, but it would be worth a closer look if this was the only problem. It isn't though. This article is really good (thanks JKP) so let me also highlight the next paragraph:

"Moreover, it is hardly surprising that Hebrew should have yielded more actual words than other languages. By designing their algorithms for vowellessness and anagrams, Hauer and Kondrak tilted the playing field in favor of Semitic languages. If one takes, for example, a three-letter English word like “cat,” one can derive only one other word, “act,” by scrambling it—and many three-letter English words yield nothing at all when rearranged. But with a three-letter Hebrew word, the results will be quite different. By adding different vowels to the consonants yod-lamed-daled, for example, one can get yeled, a male child or boy; yalad, “he gave birth”; yeyleyd, “he will give birth”; l’yad, “next to”; and d’li, a bucket. This gives Hebrew a significant competitive advantage, because it will present the cryptographer with many more words to work with, especially if he is willing to take liberties with them like Google Translate."

Closed case for me.

I am puzzled.

Hauer and Kondrak wrote:
"In order to apply our system to abjads, we remove all vowels in the corpora prior to deriving the language models used by the script decipherment step."

Shouldn't three consonants in Hebrew be compared with three consonants in English (not consonant-vowel-consonant like "cat")?
Since they consider yeyleyd (with 'y' occurring three times) and "d'li" (with no 'y'), shouldn't the same be done for English?

Take English words with only 0..n occurrences of y,l,d, and all the vowels you need. They are a rather long list, including:

add, added, aided, ailed, all, aloud, daily, dale, day, dead, deadly, deal, deed, delay, delayed, dial, did, died, dull, dyed, eyed, idle, idol, ill, lad, lady, laid, lay, lead, led, lied, lily, loud, odd, oiled, old, yell, yelled, yield, yielded.....