A model of language inflection graphs

Henryk Fukś (), Babak Farzad () and Yi Cao ()
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Henryk Fukś: Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada L2S 3A1, Canada
Babak Farzad: Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada L2S 3A1, Canada
Yi Cao: Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada L2S 3A1, Canada

International Journal of Modern Physics C (IJMPC), 2014, vol. 25, issue 06, 1-12

Abstract: Inflection graphs are highly complex networks representing relationships between inflectional forms of words in human languages. For so-called synthetic languages, such as Latin or Polish, they have particularly interesting structure due to the abundance of inflectional forms. We construct the simplest form of inflection graphs, namely a bipartite graph in which one group of vertices corresponds to dictionary headwords and the other group to inflected forms encountered in a given text. We, then, study projection of this graph on the set of headwords. The projection decomposes into a large number of connected components, to be called word groups. Distribution of sizes of word group exhibits some remarkable properties, resembling cluster distribution in a lattice percolation near the critical point. We propose a simple model which produces graphs of this type, reproducing the desired component distribution and other topological features.

Keywords: Complex networks; inflection graphs; percolation; scaling; 64.60.ah; 05.90.+m; 05.70.Jk; 02.50.-r; 64.60.aq (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
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DOI: 10.1142/S0129183114500132

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