Automated Topic Analysis of the Voynich Manuscript

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Maybe in order to get some meaningful results, we need a less restrictive or more specific null hypothesis. For example, H0 is "within a single language topic assignment doesn't depend on hands" (that is, separate tests for language A and language B).

This is a very interesting question.

I performed a Chi² test to examine the correlation between NMF-derived topics and scribal hands, separately for Currier languages A and B.

Language A

• Topics show very strong correlation with hands (hand 1 and 4).
  
• Some topics are almost exclusive to one hand.
  Example: Topic 10 appears 85 times with hand 4, only once with hand 1.
  
• Chi² = 348.76, p-value ≈ 7.3e-69 → extremely significant.
  

Language B

• Correlation is weaker, but still statistically significant.
  
• Topic distributions are more spread across hands 2, 3, and 5.
  
• Chi² = 64.13, p-value ≈ 1.6e-6 → lower than language A, but still statistically significant
  

Conclusion

• Topics are strongly linked to scribal hands, especially in Language A.
  
• Maybe the most important suggestion is, that according to these results, the scribes may not only be copyists, but thematic contributors, at least for some sections of the manuscript. Just to remember, the topics are independently calculated from hand or language, just with the paragraph inputs. The relation between the topics and the languages/hands is studied after the topics are determined by NMF model.