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''.
Cite
@article{arxiv.cond-mat/0312586,
title = {Thesaurus as a complex network},
author = {Adriano de Jesus Holanda and Ivan Torres Pisa and Osame Kinouchi and Alexandre Souto Martinez and Evandro Eduardo Seron Ruiz},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:cond-mat/0312586},
year = {2010}
}
Comments
Contribution to the Proceedings of `Trends and Perspectives in Extensive and Nonextensive Statistical Mechanics', in honour of Constantino Tsallis' 60th birthday (submitted Physica A)