Usefulness of categorizing words based on occurances in different parts of the MS?

[joben]

So this is an interesting idea, but I think you would struggle to usefully assign semantic values to the words. There's no way to know what any given word might mean and little internal validation for the guesses you'll be forced to make.

A better idea would be not to assign semantic categories but rather grammatical categories. There are far fewer grammatical categories in a language, so much less precise guesses are needed, and there will be some internal validation of your results because certain grammatical patterns would be unlikely or prohibited.

I recommend reading some of Marco Ponzi's work here You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Thanks, I will read up more on this guy.

Basically what I'm thinking about now is finding some low-hanging fruit that has most likely already been tried. For instance, if a plant has berries on the illustration, the word for "berry" might exist on that page. If the same word would be present only on pages with illustrations of plants with visible berries, then it could be something worth looking into.

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There is one very big problem with the Montemurro and Zanette analysis, namely that the B-language part of the Herbal pages and the A-language part of the Herbal pages are not related to each other. This undermines the tentative conclusion that the selected key words are related to the topic of the pages based on the illustrations.

This is from memory, so a closer look at this question is warranted.

I have read about the A and B-languages before but I havn't understood it completely. I will try to learn more about this because it seems like this is something that can mess up my plan.