• Options
• Login
• Desktop Style

Confirmation that spaces are really spaces

• Index

  • The Voynich Ninja
  • Voynich Research
  • Analysis of the text
  • Confirmation that spaces are really spaces
• Confirmation that spaces are really spaces

• RE: Confirmation that spaces are really spaces

  Jorge_Stolfi > Yesterday, 02:29 PM

  (Yesterday, 07:26 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Would you like to test your model on Thai? This is written mostly without word spaces.  It would just need to be able to read unicode - I expect it would be UTF-8.

  
  I would be interested too.  Do you have a suitable text, or can you point me to one?
  
  Thanks, and all the best, --stolfi

• RE: Confirmation that spaces are really spaces

  Juan_Sali > Yesterday, 02:59 PM

  This is a bit off-topic, just an idea to test: How many words of Voynichese are a part of a larger Voynichese word? 
  And compare the results with same analisys of another languages. And do the same with units in another languages smaller than words, at level of bigrams, trigrams... 
  They idea is to test if Voychenese words have a behaviour similar to words of another languages or to units smaller than words.

• RE: Confirmation that spaces are really spaces

  quimqu > Yesterday, 05:27 PM

  (Yesterday, 07:26 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Would you like to test your model on Thai? This is written mostly without word spaces. 
  It would just need to be able to read unicode - I expect it would be UTF-8. I would be interested to see how well it does.

  
  OK, done. I took the book ThaiBhagavadGita from Sitalatma You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
  
  I cleaned the text taking only the paragraphs and removing the non Thai chars. This is how it looks like:
  
  ถึงแม้ว่าหนังสือ.ภควัตคีตาฺ.จะได้รับความนิยมจากการพิมพ์และการอ่านอย่างแพร่หลาย.เดิมทีเป็นตอนหนึ่งของ.มหาภารตะฺ.ซึ่งเป็นวรรณกรรมประวัติศาสตร์ภาษาสันสกฤตของโลกในอดีต.มหาภารตะฺ
  
  I have to tune the model as at the beginning I had about 56% of the found segmens single characters, and that made the spacing detection go to almost 100%. It was too atomized. So I limited the model to only allow up to 10% of the segments found to be sole characters. With that, you can see the results here:
  
  Number of gold words: 32413
  Length of concatenated text: 916412
  Stopping at iteration 1274 with char_ratio=0.100
  
  SEGMENTATION STATS:
  Number of segments: 235852
  Segments per word: 7.28
  Percentage of 1 character segments: 10.00%
  
  EVALUATION RESULTS, length aware BPE:
  Correct starts: 93.626%  Correct ends: 93.626%
  Boundary recall: 93.626%  Perfect words: 87.406%
  
  Example, first 200 characters segmented:
  ถึงแม้ว่า | หน | ัง | ส | ือ | ภควัตคีตาฺ | จะ | ได้รับความ | นิ | ยม | จากการ | พิ | ม | พ | ์ | และการ | อ | ่าน | อย่าง | แ | พร | ่ | หลาย | เดิม | ที | เป็น | ตอน | หนึ่ง | ของ | มหา | ภ | าร | ต | ะฺ | ซึ่งเป็น | วรรณกรรม | ประ | วัต | ิ | ศาสตร์ | ภา | ษ | าส | ัน | ส | ก | ฤ | ต | ของ | โลก | ในอ | ดีต | มหา | ภ | าร | ต | ะฺ | กล่าว | ถึง | สถาน | การณ์ | ซึ่ง | น | ํ | า | เร | าม | าส | ู่

• RE: Confirmation that spaces are really spaces

  quimqu > Yesterday, 06:03 PM

  The Thai experiment has given me a new approach with the model, limiting the one single character segment. Setting a maximum one single character segment to 10%of the segments, has even improved the space detecting KPI in the Voynich:
  
  
  Length of Voynich text without spaces: 190728
  Number of original words (Voynich): 37503
  
  Results on original spaces (Voynich, length aware BPE):
  Total word boundaries (start+end): 75006
  Correct word starts: 32782  (87.412 percent) *
  Correct word ends: 32782  (87.412 percent) *
  Words with both boundaries correct: 28627  (76.333 percent)
  
  Boundary precision: 59.192 percent  Boundary recall: 87.411 percent  Boundary F1: 70.586 percent **
  Oversegmentation factor: 1.477  Segments per word: 1.48
  Percentage of 1 character segments: 9.98 percent
  
  * the same number is normal, as a space is always at the beginning of a word or at the end of it.
  ** Boundary precision (59.19%) means that about six in ten predicted boundaries match real spaces, while the rest are internal morphemic splits inside words (for example fachys becomes fa | chy | s). Boundary recall (87.41%) means the model successfully recovers 87% real word boundaries in the text. Boundary F1 (70.59%) summarizes both effects, showing that the model captures most true boundaries while still adding some internal segment breaks.
  
  Example, first 300 characters segmented:
  
  f | a | chys | yk | al | ar | a | taiin | shol | shor | y | cth | r | es | yk | or | shol | dy |  | sor | y | ckh | ar | or | yk | air | cht | aiin | shar | as | e | cth | ar | cth | ar | d | an | sy | aiir | sheky | or | ykaiin | shod | cth | o | ary | cth | es | dar | aiin | s | ys | oiin | oteey | ot | eos | rol | oty | cth | i | ar | daiin | okaiin | or | ok | an | sair | yche | ar | cth | aiin | cph | ar | cfh | aiin | ydar | ai | shy |  | odar | c' | y | shol | cph | o | yo | ydar | sh | s | cfh | oaiin | sh | odar | yy | shey | shody | ok | cho | yot | chol | chocthy | os | chyd | ain | chor | k | os
  
  In my previous run, qokeedy was splitted in quite different ways ('qok'+'eedy', 'eedy'+'qok' (where two qokeedy are together)). In this run, qokedy and qokeedy appear as full "words" and qokeeedy appears as the junction of two morphems:
  
  Number of occurrences of 'qokedy': 269
  Distinct segmentation patterns for 'qokedy': 1
  Patterns and counts (most frequent first):
  269  times:  qokedy
  
  Number of occurrences of 'qokeedy': 303
  Distinct segmentation patterns for 'qokeedy': 1
  Patterns and counts (most frequent first):
  303  times:  qokeedy
  
  Number of occurrences of 'qokeeedy': 5
  Distinct segmentation patterns for 'qokeeedy': 1
  Patterns and counts (most frequent first):
  5  times:  qokee | edy

• RE: Confirmation that spaces are really spaces

  asteckley > Today, 02:07 AM

  (14-11-2025, 11:41 PM)quimqu Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.What I did was apply a Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) segmentation model. This model does not need to know anything about the language. It simply takes the entire text as a sequence of characters with no spaces or punctuation, identifies which pairs of characters are most frequent, and merges them. After a certain number of merges, the model produces a set of segments that can be interpreted as statistical morphemes. With these segments, you can try to reconstruct the original words by segmenting them into the most likely units, and then compare whether these boundaries match the original spaces.

  
  Using BPE in this way is a useful and interesting approach and your conclusions seem reasonable -- providing they aren't interpreted for more than what they are. I think you have to be careful with using the word "morpheme" though, since it suggests that each one carries some linguistic meaning or grammatical function, and by extension that we are dealing with words in a linguistic sense. BPE doesn't guarantee that at all.
  
  You did initially qualify it as "statistical morphemes"  (Not sure what that exactly is, but at least it distinguishes it from actual morphemes.) but after that you seem to treat them more like actual morphemes. Maybe it would be clearer and more accurate to just call them “segments”, or something like that, to avoid implying full linguistic status unless (until?) there is separate evidence for that. They could be (as an example) simply atomic components of some structured cipher system.

• RE: Confirmation that spaces are really spaces

  ReneZ > 8 hours ago

  Thanks @quimqu for the effort!
  
  

  (Yesterday, 05:27 PM)quimqu Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.EVALUATION RESULTS, length aware BPE:
  Correct starts: 93.626%  Correct ends: 93.626%
  Boundary recall: 93.626%  Perfect words: 87.406%
  
  Example, first 200 characters segmented:
  ถึงแม้ว่า | หน | ัง | ส | ือ | ภควัตคีตาฺ | จะ | ได้รับความ | นิ | ยม | จากการ | พิ | ม | พ | ์ | และการ | อ | ่าน | อย่าง | แ | พร | ่ | หลาย | เดิม | ที | เป็น | ตอน | หนึ่ง | ของ | มหา | ภ | าร | ต | ะฺ | ซึ่งเป็น | วรรณกรรม | ประ | วัต | ิ | ศาสตร์ | ภา | ษ | าส | ัน | ส | ก | ฤ | ต | ของ | โลก | ในอ | ดีต | มหา | ภ | าร | ต | ะฺ | กล่าว | ถึง | สถาน | การณ์ | ซึ่ง | น | ํ | า | เร | าม | าส | ู่

  
  Unfortunately, this is not correct. It is even very far off. I wonder how the tool decided on the 90+% percentages.
  
  The line:
  
  ถึงแม้ว่าหนังสือ.ภควัตคีตาฺ.จะได้รับความนิยมจากการพิมพ์และการอ่านอย่างแพร่หลาย.เดิมทีเป็นตอนหนึ่งของ.มหาภารตะฺ.ซึ่งเป็นวรรณกรรมประวัติศาสตร์ภาษาสันสกฤตของโลกในอดีต.มหาภารตะฺ
  
  is quite an unfortunate choice as a sample Thai text. It includes several names that are Sanskrit. The full stops are also unusual and while they may be used in Thai, here they seem to also represent quotes. The character that looks like a tiny dot below some characters is normally not used.
  I doubt that this was the main cause for the failure, but it will not have helped. 

• RE: Confirmation that spaces are really spaces

  quimqu > 7 hours ago

  (8 hours ago)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The full stops are also unusual and while they may be used in Thai, here they seem to also represent quotes. The character that looks like a tiny dot below some characters is normally not used.

  
  Hi René, I use "." to separate the words. In the original document the "." are spaces.
  
  I don't understand Thai and it could be very well that there are sanscrit words. If you can provide a text, I could give a try.
  
  About the percentages: if we have word "house" and the split is "hou"+"se", the boundary recall is 100%, because there are two splits that match the original word. Of course there are internal splits, but in terms of spaces recall, they are not counted. A 93% of boundary recall means that 7% of the boundaries were not matched (for example, "these houses" could have splitted in "thes" "ehou" "ses", where the middle space is not matched).
• Next Oldest Next Newest