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Comment by chwolfe | Hacker News Reader

If you're interested in the work being done to understand Indus script, Rajesh Rao delivered a TED talk with plenty of machine learning goodness:

http://www.ted.com/talks/rajesh_rao_computing_a_rosetta_ston...

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Rao's claims are nonsense, according to computational linguist Richard Sproat (Bell Labs, University of Illinois, OHSU, now at Google):

http://www.cslu.ogi.edu/~sproatr/newindex/indus.html

...and the counterargument has been debunked too. A lot of complaints were just ad hominem attack alleging Tamil supremacy, Tamil ethnocentrism. The first note of dicord that strikes you as an Indian is that bar one, all authors of that paper were from North India. If any Tamil bias is expected from that rergion it would be a bias against Tamil.

I dont know why Rao's claim (well they arent quite claims either, not yet atleast, they are rather a call for further investigation) have been so spectacularly blown out of proportion and why people get so upset about it.

Sproat at least does not say that Rao in any form claimed that his work "proves" anything one way or the other, rather that it was the "discussion" around the paper that claims a proof. I would have been happier if that distinction was made clearer.

In anycase if you search HN you will find an interesting thread discussing this topic. Learned quite a bit from it.

Here is the previous discussion http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4061748 and some here as well

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4154755

EDIT: @kylebgorman I dont consider myself qualified enough to agree or disagree, but have to say that I was taken aback by the push back it received, particulay the vociferous allegation of Tamil supremacy.

EDIT @kylebgorman wait I didnt say that the paper or the criticism was ethnically biased, but that ethnic bias was a major criticism that was levied against Rao's paper. This comment on the thread will have some examples http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4062129 rebuttals, counter rebuttals, , counter-counter... you get the idea.

Whether or not there is a claim that Rao et al. were driven by "ethnocentrism" (I do not think this is the word you are looking for), do you dispute the facts I linked to?

The many computational linguists who have discussed these papers in public fora have expressed disgust with the scientific naïveity of the Rao et al. paper; the pushback is due to its very poor scientific merits (in contrast with its very high publication profile), not some ethnic bias as you seem to allege.

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