Haitao Liu and Fengguo Hu 2008 EPL 83 18002 doi:10.1209/0295-5075/83/18002
Haitao Liu and Fengguo Hu
Show affiliationsThat almost all language networks are small-world and scale-free raises the question of whether syntax plays a role to measure the complexity of a language network. To answer this question, we built up two random language (dependency) networks based on a dependency syntactic network and investigated the complexity of these three language networks to see if the non-syntactic ones have network indicators similar to the syntactic one. The results show that all the three networks are small-world and scale-free. While syntax influences the indicators of a complex network, scale-free is only a necessary but not sufficient condition to judge whether a network is syntactic or non-syntactic. The network analysis focuses on the global organization of a language, it may not reflect the subtle syntactic differences of the sentence structure.
Issue 1 (July 2008)
Received 17 April 2008, accepted for publication 19 May 2008
Published 13 June 2008
Haitao Liu and Fengguo Hu 2008 EPL 83 18002
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