Marke Fincher's Word Pair Permutation Analysis

[MichelleL11]

Came across this paper (attached below) which seems to address a concern that is becoming more and more of an issue for my ongoing testing of possible approaches.

I know that this was of interest to a group including Koen and nablator back in 2019 and Koen was going to e-mail (see this thread You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.)

Koen -- did you ever hear back from him?

I know that you and nablator did some separate investigations that looked for repeated word strings and reached some conclusions, but that question is a little different than what Fincher's work supposedly shows -- as far as I could tell from this paper.

Of course, Fincher's paper suffers maybe from a lack of breadth of data -- like all of this type of work, the more languages tested the more convincing it would be.

Any other thoughts on this paper and its approach?  I continue to hone my ability to critically evaluate such work . . . 

Also, have to ask it:

Any thoughts on Fincher's conclusion that word transposition has to be involved to get the VM into a "natural language" form?