Automated Topic Analysis of the Voynich Manuscript

[quimqu]

Claire Bowern and two of her PhD students also addressed the question of topic modeling in the VMS here: 

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Hello Lisa,

Thank you for sharing the paper — I found it very interesting.

I noticed that Claire Bowern and the two PhD students appear to have fixed the number of topics to 5, corresponding to the known sections of the manuscript. In contrast, in my own research, I allowed the models to determine the optimal number of topics, as I wanted to avoid imposing any predefined structure based on the manuscript's divisions.

In my most recent study using NMF, I evaluated the optimal number of topics using four different KPIs:

• Pseudo-perplexity
  
• Topic coherence
  
• Topic overlap (Jaccard similarity)
  
• Number of unique high-weight words
  

These metrics consistently pointed to 11 as the optimal number of topics, and all subsequent results were based on this configuration (for example the low p-value of the hand, telling us that the scriba hands are very linked to the topics found).

Regards.