We present a simple objective function that when optimized yields accurate solutions to both decipherment and cognate pair identification problems. The objective simultaneously scores a matching between two alphabets and a matching between two lexicons, each in a different language. We introduce a simple coordinate descent procedure that efficiently finds effective solutions to the resulting combinatorial optimization problem. Our system requires only a list of words in both languages as input, yet it competes with and surpasses several state-of-the-art systems that are both substantially more complex and make use of more information. 1

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