Automated Topic Analysis of the Voynich Manuscript

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Just to add here, Naibbe ciphertexts exhibit language-dependent and topic-dependent variation in word frequencies, for the simple reason that alphabet letter and plaintext bigram frequencies can vary by language and topic. For example, because it uses the word “herba” very often, a herbal plaintext might have more Bs than an astrology text, holding the language constant across both texts. As an exercise, I recommend that people do NMF on my reference Naibbe ciphertexts, using 1000-5000 tokens as the “document” subdivision. Each of those reference texts is equal parts of Dante’s Divine Comedy, Book 16 of Pliny’s Natural History, Grosseteste’s De sphaera, and the Latin alchemical herbal. The Divine Comedy portion will cleanly separate out, as will the alchemical herbal section. De sphaera and Natural History will tend to resemble each other a bit more.

Hello Magnesium,

I have doubts how to process your reference Naibbe ciphertexts.

- shall i process all of them one after the other? In case it is yes, which is the order, the alphabetical order of the files?
- how should I divide the paragraphs or pages?  Or should I take one file as a "page" every time. For topic processing I need to separate the texts so the progam can find the topics of he texts (one topic per text). How should I separate the texts?

Once I have the pages (or the chunks of texts that should be given a topic), I can show you the results and see if it is coherent. I don't know which real text is in each file.

Thank you