Online Colloquium Computer Science - Dr. Colin Layfield, University of Malta

Title: The Application of Latent Semantic Analysis to the Voynich Manuscript

Abstract:

The Voynich Manuscript (VM) is a medieval manuscript likely written in the 15th century (Yale Univ., Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library MS 408). The manuscript is written in an unknown language or code using an unidentified set of symbols that has yet to be made legible. Additionally, the codex contains many strange and fantastical images of plants, people, and cosmological/zodiac illustrations, the meaning of which are also unknown. One of the main research avenues into the VM is to examine its textual content to understand how it behaves relative to known texts; this can provide insight as to whether the mysterious writings contain decipherable text or not. In this paper, we explore the coherence and flow of the manuscript using Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA). LSA is a technique that may help ascertain whether the behavior of the text within the VM shows evidence of a coherent flow of topical content, by comparative analysis of text samples that are near each other, farther away from each other, at section breaks, or even page breaks. The advantage of this strategy is that LSA analysis can be undertaken without actually knowing the meaning of the text. We expect portions of text that are near to each other to have a relatively high similarity score, that is, to be semantically related. We also expect that at anticipated topic breaks (pages or sections), the similarity score between adjacent text blocks would be smaller, as the breaks seem to represent a change in topic. Both of these patterns are observed in the two control manuscripts studied as proof-of-concept experiments as well as in the Voynich Manuscript. Patterns then observed in several sections of the VM indicate that there is an overall coherence to the text. Other experiments suggest surprising hypotheses about the original order of the leaves and offer new directions for linguistic, cryptographical, computational, and other types of investigations of the Voynich.