Automated Topic Analysis of the Voynich Manuscript

[quimqu]

Really interesting work. I recommend looking under the hood at how LDA is defining "topics" with specific word types. In my own dalliances with LDA, I have found that LDA tends to create one "topic" that's defined by many of the globally commonest word types within the VMS and then assigns a lot of folios to this one topic. Something like that could be why according to LDA, the biological and cosmological sections are the same topic, while NMF says the two sections cleanly separate into different topics.

Thanks for the suggestion! I actually followed your advice and removed the most common words. I choosed those appearing in more than 60% of folios: ['dy', 'dar', 'daiin', 's', 'or', 'chol', 'y']

After cleaning, I re-ran all three models:




LDA now detects 9 topics but still clusters cosmological and biological almost together.





BERTopic now detects 4 topics.





NMF gives now 4 topics (elbow method, not very clear):