COMPLEX NETWORK ANALYSIS OF LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC TEXTS

Iwona Grabska-Gradzińska (), Andrzej Kulig (), Jarosław Kwapień () and Stanisław Drożdż ()
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Iwona Grabska-Gradzińska: Faculty of Physics, Astronomy and Applied Computer Science, Jagiellonian University, ul. Reymonta 4, 30-059 Kraków, Poland
Andrzej Kulig: Institute of Nuclear Physics, Polish Academy of Sciences, ul. Radzikowskiego 152, 31-342 Kraków, Poland
Jarosław Kwapień: Institute of Nuclear Physics, Polish Academy of Sciences, ul. Radzikowskiego 152, 31-342 Kraków, Poland
Stanisław Drożdż: Institute of Nuclear Physics, Polish Academy of Sciences, ul. Radzikowskiego 152, 31-342 Kraków, Poland;

International Journal of Modern Physics C (IJMPC), 2012, vol. 23, issue 07, 1-15

Abstract: We present results from our quantitative study of statistical and network properties of literary and scientific texts written in two languages: English and Polish. We show that Polish texts are described by the Zipf law with the scaling exponent smaller than the one for the English language. We also show that the scientific texts are typically characterized by the rank-frequency plots with relatively short range of power-law behavior as compared to the literary texts. We then transform the texts into their word-adjacency network representations and find another difference between the languages. For the majority of the literary texts in both languages, the corresponding networks revealed the scale-free structure, while this was not always the case for the scientific texts. However, all the network representations of texts were hierarchical. We do not observe any qualitative and quantitative difference between the languages. However, if we look at other network statistics like the clustering coefficient and the average shortest path length, the English texts occur to possess more clustered structure than do the Polish ones. This result was attributed to differences in grammar of both languages, which was also indicated in the Zipf plots. All the texts, however, show network structure that differs from any of the Watts–Strögatz, the Barabási–Albert, and the Erdös–Rényi architectures.

Keywords: Complex networks; Zipf law; natural language; 64.60aq; 89.75Fb (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

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DOI: 10.1142/S0129183112500519

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