Thesaurus as a complex network

Abstract

A thesaurus is one, out of many, possible representations of term (or word) connectivity. The terms of a thesaurus are seen as the nodes and their relationship as the links of a directed graph. The directionality of the links retains all the thesaurus information and allows the measurement of several quantities. This has lead to a new term classification according to the characteristics of the nodes, for example, nodes with no links in, no links out, etc. Using an electronic available thesaurus we have obtained the incoming and outgoing link distributions. While the incoming link distribution follows a stretched exponential function, the lower bound for the outgoing link distribution has the same envelope of the scientific paper citation distribution proposed by Albuquerque and Tsallis. However, a better fit is obtained by simpler function which is the solution of Ricatti's differential equation. We conjecture that this differential equation is the continuous limit of a stochastic growth model of the thesaurus network. We also propose a new manner to arrange a thesaurus using the ``inversion method''.

Contribution to the Proceedings of `Trends and Perspectives in Extensive and Nonextensive Statistical Mechanics', in honour of Constantino Tsallis' 60th birthday (submitted Physica A)

References in corpus (6)

• Topology of the conceptual network of language
• Giant strongly connected component of directed networks
• Global Organization of the Lexicon
• Deterministic walks in random networks: an application to thesaurus graphs
• Burr, Levy, Tsallis
• Core Lexicon and Contagious Words

Cited by in corpus (17)

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• Authorship recognition via fluctuation analysis of network topology and word intermittency
• Generalized exponential function and discrete growth models
• Lobby index as a network centrality measure
• Parameter-tuning Networks: Experiments and Active Walk Model
• Hirsch index as a network centrality measure
• Modeling Connectivity in Terms of Network Activity
• Hubs in Languages: Scale Free Networks of Synonyms
• Inflection system of a language as a complex network
• Generalized Exponential Function and some of its Applications to Complex Systems
• Language Networks: a Practical Approach
• Bilinear effect in complex systems
• A model of language inflection graphs
• Complex network classification using partially self-avoiding deterministic walks