Cross comparison of synonym graphs in a multi linguistic context

Abstract

Language is one of the most important aspects of human cognition; it represents the way we think, act and communicate with each other. Each language has its own history, background, and form. A language represents a lot of important cultural aspects of the nation speaking it. Languages differ and so do cultures. In this paper we analyze cultural differences between East and West in a multi-linguistic context from a complex networks point of view. There has been considerable work on the topic of cultural differences by psychologist and sociologist. Also studies on complex networks that make use of WordNet have been done, but until now there is no previous work that uses WordNets from different Eastern and Western languages as complex lexical networks in order to obtain possible differences or similarities between the cultures using those respective languages. Our work aims to do this.

Analyzing and modeling real-world phenomena with complex networks: a survey of applications

“…Semantic networks usually encode relationships between a subset of words of a language, as in a thesaurus where each entry (frequently a word) is followed by a list of words that express similar concepts (not necessarily synonyms) [488] -note that networks containing only synonyms are also commonly employed [489][490][491]. An example of English thesaurus used to build semantic networks is the Roget's Thesaurus, originally published in 1852.…”