[Article] A Hidden Markov Model for the Linguistic Analysis of the Voynich Manuscript

[davidjackson]

No, that's not correct. These are completely arbitrary initial conditions that are slightly off from 'all probabilities equal', to avoid that the process gets stuck from the very beginning.

Really? Obviously you have far more experience than I do in these things, but I read it as he initialised the algorithm with random values as explained in part 2.3) (equations 6-10) then reestimated and used the same values to carry out both runs (init values for equations 11-12).

From the introduction to section 3:

First, we consider the case of a text in English and we implement the model optimization
algorithm to classify the letters of the alphabet (after removing all the punctuation signs) into two
classes corresponding to the inner states of the HMM. It is shown that these classes are clearly associated
with the vowels and the consonants in English and this provides the basic phonemic structure of the
language. Testing the algorithm with a known language gives us the necessary confidence to apply it
to the Voynich manuscript.