45,165 research outputs found
Multilayer Network of Language: a Unified Framework for Structural Analysis of Linguistic Subsystems
Recently, the focus of complex networks research has shifted from the
analysis of isolated properties of a system toward a more realistic modeling of
multiple phenomena - multilayer networks. Motivated by the prosperity of
multilayer approach in social, transport or trade systems, we propose the
introduction of multilayer networks for language. The multilayer network of
language is a unified framework for modeling linguistic subsystems and their
structural properties enabling the exploration of their mutual interactions.
Various aspects of natural language systems can be represented as complex
networks, whose vertices depict linguistic units, while links model their
relations. The multilayer network of language is defined by three aspects: the
network construction principle, the linguistic subsystem and the language of
interest. More precisely, we construct a word-level (syntax, co-occurrence and
its shuffled counterpart) and a subword level (syllables and graphemes) network
layers, from five variations of original text (in the modeled language). The
obtained results suggest that there are substantial differences between the
networks structures of different language subsystems, which are hidden during
the exploration of an isolated layer. The word-level layers share structural
properties regardless of the language (e.g. Croatian or English), while the
syllabic subword level expresses more language dependent structural properties.
The preserved weighted overlap quantifies the similarity of word-level layers
in weighted and directed networks. Moreover, the analysis of motifs reveals a
close topological structure of the syntactic and syllabic layers for both
languages. The findings corroborate that the multilayer network framework is a
powerful, consistent and systematic approach to model several linguistic
subsystems simultaneously and hence to provide a more unified view on language
Competition between Two Kinds of Correlations in Literary Texts
A theory of additive Markov chains with long-range memory is used for
description of correlation properties of coarse-grained literary texts. The
complex structure of the correlations in texts is revealed. Antipersistent
correlations at small distances, L 300 define
this nontrivial structure. For some concrete examples of literary texts, the
memory functions are obtained and their power-law behavior at long distances is
disclosed. This property is shown to be a cause of self-similarity of texts
with respect to the decimation procedure.Comment: 7 pages, 7 figures, Submitted to Physica
All mixed up? Finding the optimal feature set for general readability prediction and its application to English and Dutch
Readability research has a long and rich tradition, but there has been too little focus on general readability prediction without targeting a specific audience or text genre. Moreover, though NLP-inspired research has focused on adding more complex readability features there is still no consensus on which features contribute most to the prediction. In this article, we investigate in close detail the feasibility of constructing a readability prediction system for English and Dutch generic text using supervised machine learning. Based on readability assessments by both experts
and a crowd, we implement different types of text characteristics ranging from easy-to-compute superficial text characteristics to features requiring a deep linguistic processing, resulting in ten
different feature groups. Both a regression and classification setup are investigated reflecting the two possible readability prediction tasks: scoring individual texts or comparing two texts. We show that going beyond correlation calculations for readability optimization using a wrapper-based genetic algorithm optimization approach is a promising task which provides considerable insights in which feature combinations contribute to the overall readability prediction. Since we also have gold standard information available for those features requiring deep processing we are able to investigate the true upper bound of our Dutch system. Interestingly, we will observe that the performance of our fully-automatic readability prediction pipeline is on par with the pipeline using golden deep syntactic and semantic information
Probing the topological properties of complex networks modeling short written texts
In recent years, graph theory has been widely employed to probe several
language properties. More specifically, the so-called word adjacency model has
been proven useful for tackling several practical problems, especially those
relying on textual stylistic analysis. The most common approach to treat texts
as networks has simply considered either large pieces of texts or entire books.
This approach has certainly worked well -- many informative discoveries have
been made this way -- but it raises an uncomfortable question: could there be
important topological patterns in small pieces of texts? To address this
problem, the topological properties of subtexts sampled from entire books was
probed. Statistical analyzes performed on a dataset comprising 50 novels
revealed that most of the traditional topological measurements are stable for
short subtexts. When the performance of the authorship recognition task was
analyzed, it was found that a proper sampling yields a discriminability similar
to the one found with full texts. Surprisingly, the support vector machine
classification based on the characterization of short texts outperformed the
one performed with entire books. These findings suggest that a local
topological analysis of large documents might improve its global
characterization. Most importantly, it was verified, as a proof of principle,
that short texts can be analyzed with the methods and concepts of complex
networks. As a consequence, the techniques described here can be extended in a
straightforward fashion to analyze texts as time-varying complex networks
- …