Central nodes of the Chinese syntactic networks

Abstract

Based on two syntactic dependency treebanks built with two different styles of Chinese, a statistical study is conducted regarding word-frequency and distributions. We extracted three grammatical words as the research objects and analyzed their network features, including all degree, out-degree, in-degree, all closeness, in-closeness, out-closeness and betweenness. Then these three nodes were removed from the networks. We recorded and compared the network features of the two original networks and the three networks from which one node is respectively removed, including the number of vertices, average degree, average path length, diameter, the number of isolated vertices, domain and density. The results show that all three function words are central nodes of the Chinese syntactic networks but have different status. Their influence to the overall structure is also quite different. The research not only provides a new method for the study about Chinese grammatical words but also provides a new way of thinking the node characteristics in the complex network.

Language clustering with word co-occurrence networks based on parallel texts

“…This means that a word co-occurrence network and its syntactic dependency network counterpart derived from the same body of authentic language data tend to be highly similar in terms of network topology, for there is a significant overlap between the edges of the two types of network. For instance, the central vertices of the word co-occurrence network in Figure 1 tend to be function words, which is consistent with the case of a syntactic dependency network [14,15]. Therefore, word co-occurrence networks can constitute a potential substitute for syntactic dependency networks in studies of linguistic networks.…”

Chinese Writing of Deaf or Hard-of-Hearing Students and Normal-Hearing Peers from Complex Network Approach

“…The vertices with extremely high network centrality, i.e., the hubs, tend to be function words (e.g., articles and prepositions, etc. ; Ferrer-i-Cancho and Solé, 2001; Solé et al, 2010; Chen and Liu, 2011; Cong and Liu, 2014). These results imply that function words are probably in important central positions in syntactic networks.…”

“…Function words play an important role in constructing complex Chinese sentence patterns (Chen and Liu, 2011). The use of function words is a significant representation of the syntactic ability for Chinese learners.…”

Function Nodes in Chinese Syntactic Networks

“…So far, much research has been carried out, mainly concerned with the structure of syntactic dependency networks (Ferrer i Cancho 2005;Liu 2008;Chen and Liu 2011;Čech et al 2011), the patterns in syntactic dependency networks (Ferrer i Cancho et al 2004;, language development or language evolution (Ke and Yao 2008;Mukherjee et al 2013;Mehler et al 2011), language clustering and linguistic categorization (Liu 2010;Liu and Cong 2013;Gong et al 2012;Abramov and Mehler 2011), manual and machine translation (Amancio et al 2008;Amancio et al 2011), word sense disambiguation (Christiano and Raphael 2013), communication and interaction (Banisch et al 2010;Mehler et al 2010), the structure of semantic networks (Borge-Holthoefer and Arenas 2010; Liu 2009), phonetics (Arbesman et al 2010;Yu et al 2011), morphology (Čech andMačutek 2009;Liu and Xu 2011), parts of speech (Ferrer i Cancho et al 2007), Knowledge Networks (Allee 2007), cognitive networks (Mehler et al 2012).…”

“…Works on Chinese language include networks at different levels: networks taking as nodes the Chinese characters (Li and Zhou 2007;Peng et al 2008), words and phrases (Li et al 2005), phoneme and syllables (Yu et al 2011;Peng et al 2008), syntactic structure (Liu 2008;Liu 2010;Chen and Liu 2011;, semantic structure (Liu 2009), etc. In general, the language network research, including those devoted to Chinese language, is developing rapidly in recent years. But there is surely vast area to be explored, with abundant issues awaiting investigation.…”