New Research: Quantitative analysis of lexical independence in MS 408 (DIS Model)

[Jorge_Stolfi]

I’ve just published a preprint on Zenodo regarding a structural analysis of the Voynich Manuscript. Instead of a traditional linguistic approach, I analyze the MS as a Diagrammatic Information System (DIS).You can find the full paper and data here: zenodo.org/records/18147517

Could you please define "segment" more clearly?  Do you really mean a single line? 

Did you use all the text (including labels -- each a separate segment?), or only the multiline paragraphs?

Each VMS paragraph line has ~10 tokens on average, so the similarity index between two lines is likely to be very low, down in the sampling noise level; and lexical resets should happen at the majority of line breaks.

What is "transcription column C"?  

Every transcription contains some fraction of errors, that create new lexemes that occur only once or twice in the whole book.  How do you handle that?  Do you take all words, or only the words that occur at least N times?

Shouldn't you use a metric of similarity that takes into account the number of occurrences of each lexeme in each segment?

How did you define the segments in the two control texts (Appendix)?  How many tokens per segment did they have?  You are aware, I hope, that the longer the segments are, the higher their J similarity scores will be.

Have you looked at the sets A \cup B of these control texts, to see what kind of words contributed most to their high J index?  If they are articles or other function words, you should include control texts in languages that do not have such grammatical features (which we know are absent in Voynichese).

All the best, --stolfi