I used Braille as a test language, but this is a framework to automate the decoding of any partially understood (ancient) language by creating probabilistic dictionaries.

I began working on CAMEL (Contextual Machine Learning Through the Analysis and Chunking of Partially Translated Grade 2 Braille) when I saw this atrocity: the Braille below translates to “STAIRWELL” Most sighted people don’t know Braille (to my dismay- the grammar is beautiful), this gave me the idea to write an optical Braille reader app for the sighted: the user holds their Android camera up to a sign and it automatically translates the Braille into English.

As I sat down to code this, I realized that I’d have to hard code a dictionary of Grade 2 Braille (a grammatically complex language). I have a deep disgust for hard coding (\Rightarrow) CAMEL is the program I wrote to automate the creation of a Grade 2 Braille dictionary. All code used in this project is on github.

This program is based on contextual machine learning, so I named my project CAMEL (ContextuAl MachinE Learning). The title of my paper is a mouthful, because I’m unsure of how to shorten it while maintaining clarity: CAMEL