A Hidden Markov Model for the Linguistic Analysis of the Voynich Manuscript

Autor: Luis Acedo
Jazyk: angličtina
Rok vydání: 2019
Předmět:
Zdroj: Mathematical and Computational Applications, Vol 24, Iss 1, p 14 (2019)
Druh dokumentu: article
ISSN: 2297-8747
24010014
DOI: 10.3390/mca24010014
Popis: Hidden Markov models are a very useful tool in the modeling of time series and any sequence of data. In particular, they have been successfully applied to the field of mathematical linguistics. In this paper, we apply a hidden Markov model to analyze the underlying structure of an ancient and complex manuscript, known as the Voynich manuscript, which remains undeciphered. By assuming a certain number of internal states representations for the symbols of the manuscripts, we train the network by means of the α and β -pass algorithms to optimize the model. By this procedure, we are able to obtain the so-called transition and observation matrices to compare with known languages concerning the frequency of consonant andvowel sounds. From this analysis, we conclude that transitions occur between the two states with similar frequencies to other languages. Moreover, the identification of the vowel and consonant sounds matches some previous tentative bottom-up approaches to decode the manuscript.
Databáze: Directory of Open Access Journals