What Lies Beneath: Statistical Structure in Voynichese Revealed by Transformers

[quimqu]

You're absolutely right to point that out — thanks for the clarification. You're correct that low perplexity doesn’t imply “understanding” in a human or semantic sense. It just means the model finds the sequence predictable based on what it has seen during training. In that sense, it reflects how well the model has captured the surface patterns or structure — not necessarily the meaning — of the Voynich text. I should have said something like “internal consistency” rather than “understanding”.