Does network complexity help organize Babel’s library?

Juan Pablo Cárdenas, Iván González, Gerardo Vidal and Miguel Angel Fuentes

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 2016, vol. 447, issue C, 188-198

Abstract: In this work we show that global topological properties of co-occurrent word networks constructed from texts, seem to be the fingerprint of meaningful sentences. We observe that many statistical properties of these networks depend on the frequency of words, however, others seem to be strictly determined by the grammar. Our results suggest that seems to be a lower bound of sense that depends on the correlation between mean word connectivity and word connectivity correlation. This property, in addition to being only present in meaningful texts, and absent in, until now, not decoded texts such as the Voynich manuscript, would also be exclusive for natural languages, allowing us to discriminate between these and formal texts.

Keywords: Voynich manuscript; Complex networks; Word networks; Quantitative linguistics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378437115010584
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only. Journal offers the option of making the article available online on Science direct for a fee of $3,000

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:447:y:2016:i:c:p:188-198

DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2015.12.031

Access Statistics for this article

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications is currently edited by K. A. Dawson, J. O. Indekeu, H.E. Stanley and C. Tsallis

More articles in Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().