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Show HN: I modeled the Voynich Manuscript with SBERT to test for structure

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Re: Show HN: I modeled the Voynich Manuscript with SBERT to test for structure

#91

Post by Nursie »

bpiroman wrote: post #79
bpiroman wrote: post #78

I thought it was old turkish? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6keMgLmFEk&t=1s

English translation of the manuscript is timestamped below: https://youtu.be/p6keMgLmFEk?feature=shared&t=559

Seems not - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgVZZrZ1eqY

There's also a very long thread about it here - https://www.voynich.ninja/thread-2318.html - that seems to go from "that's really interesting, let's find out more about it" to "eh, seems about the same as other revelatory announcements about Romance, Hebrew etc"

Re: Show HN: I modeled the Voynich Manuscript with SBERT to test for structure

#92

Post by userbinator »

cubefox wrote: post #34
InsideOutSanta wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> would be unlikely to have emerged from someone who was just putting gibberish on the page People often assert this, but I'm unsure of any evidence. If I wrote a manuscript in a pretend language, I would expect it to end up with language-like patterns, some automatically and some intentionally. Humans aren't random number generators, and they aren't stupid. Therefore, the implicit claim that a human could not create…

Creating gibberish with the statistical properties of a natural language is a very hard task if you do this hundreds of years before the discovery of said statistical properties.

Those statistical properties are inherent in how the human brain works.

Re: Show HN: I modeled the Voynich Manuscript with SBERT to test for structure

#94

Post by philistine »

us-merul wrote: post #13

I’ve found this to be one of the most interesting hypotheses: http://voynichproject.org/ The author made an assumption that Voynichese is a Germanic language, and it looks like he was able to make some progress with it. I’ve also come across accounts that it might be an Uralic or Finno-Ugric language. I think your approach is great, and I wonder if tweaking it for specific language families could go even further.

With how undecipherable the manuscript is, my personal theory is that it's the work of a naive artist and that there's no language behind it. Just someone aping language without knowing the rules about language: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naïve_art

It's not a mental issue, it's just a rare thing that happens. Voynich fits the whole bill for the work of a naive artist.

Re: Show HN: I modeled the Voynich Manuscript with SBERT to test for structure

#96

Post by Nursie »

cookiengineer wrote: post #71

[flagged]

Their theories appear not to be incredibly well accepted amongs people who take an interest, and appears (like other 'translations') to grant the translator so many degrees of freedom as to be effecitvely unfalsifiable.

Re: Show HN: I modeled the Voynich Manuscript with SBERT to test for structure

#97

Post by emmelaich »

renhanxue wrote: post #89
emmelaich wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's entirely possible the inks are much later. Possibly Kelly erased whatever was on the parchment previously. In fact the drawings might have made liberal use of the original, just to hide that fact. Which is worse actually. Kelly may have semi-erased an existing valuable manuscript.

The hypothesis that the manuscript is a palimpsest (that is, written on an old parchment that was scraped clean of a previous text; such recycling was common because parchment was expensive) has been thoroughly rejected. That sort of thing is detectable, in fact there's an entire field of research dedicated to recovering lost texts from palimpsests, but the Voynich manuscript shows absolutely no signs of that.

You're right. I have just read a bit about this[0] and agree. I do still believe that it's possible for the expensive parchment to have been obtained by someone uneducated or "naive", or quack and used by them.

[0] https://manuscriptroadtrip.wordpress.com/2024/09/08/multispe...

Re: Show HN: I modeled the Voynich Manuscript with SBERT to test for structure

#98

Post by flir »

thih9 wrote: post #48

(I know nothing about NLP) Does it make sense to check the process with a control group? E.g. if we ask a human to write something that resembles a language but isn’t, then conduct this process (remove suffixes, attempt grouping, etc), are we likely to get similar results?

I suppose if you've got a hypothesis about how it was written (eg the Cardan grille method) you could generate some texts via that method and see if they display the same characteristics?

Re: Show HN: I modeled the Voynich Manuscript with SBERT to test for structure

#99

Post by brig90 »

gthompson512 wrote: post #95

Sorry if I missed it, but what about keeping the suffixes and trying to do some finetuning on the source then clustering sentences or at least pages which given the media should be consistent-ish

Great question — and something I've been thinking about. I stripped suffixes mostly to normalize some of the repeated endings (aiin, dy, etc.) that felt like filler, but you’re totally right that preserving them might preserve structure I lost.

Clustering by sentence or page would be interesting too — I haven't gone that far yet, but it’d be fascinating to see if there’s consistency across visual/media sections. Appreciate the insight!

Re: Show HN: I modeled the Voynich Manuscript with SBERT to test for structure

#100

Post by brig90 »

pawanjswal wrote: post #93

This is hands-down the nerdiest and coolest deep-dive into the Voynich I’ve seen.

Honestly, I had never even heard of the manuscript before this weekend. I’ve been looking for interesting ways to strengthen my understanding of NLPs, and thought: 1) maybe this would be a good fit, and 2) maybe it hadn’t been approached in quite this way before?

That second part wasn’t super important though — this was more about learning and experimenting than trying to break new ground. Really appreciate the kind words, and hopefully it sparks someone to take it even further.

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