The Dartmouth Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics would like
to invite you to the following session:

Time: Thursday, November 8th 2012 6 - 7:30 pm

Location: Carson Hall room L02

Speaker: Sravana Reddy (Neukom Postdoctoral Fellow at Dartmouth College
affiliated with Linguistics and Computer Science)

Seminar Topic: "What do we Know About the Voynich Manuscript"

Pizza will be served.

Abstract: in 1912, a book collector named Wilfrid Voynich acquired a 
curious object from Europe: a 240-page,
lavishly illustrated folio in an unknown script. At-tempts to decipher 
the text have all hit a dead-end,
with the jury out on which (if any) language it represents, or if it's 
a code or gibberish. The availability
of statistical tools and ideas from machine learning opens up new ways 
of approaching this problem. I will
talk about methods to infer simple linguistic patterns from a given 
text -- can we tell if a script denotes
vowels and consonants? or if pages have "topics"? -- and what that 
might tell us about the Voynich Manuscript.
Along the way, I will also introduce some commonly used machinery and 
algorithms in com-putational linguistics,
and their applicability to other tasks.