tailieunhanh - Báo cáo khoa học: "Discovering Global Patterns in Linguistic Networks through Spectral Analysis: A Case Study of the Consonant Inventories"

Recent research has shown that language and the socio-cognitive phenomena associated with it can be aptly modeled and visualized through networks of linguistic entities. However, most of the existing works on linguistic networks focus only on the local properties of the networks. This study is an attempt to analyze the structure of languages via a purely structural technique, namely spectral analysis, which is ideally suited for discovering the global correlations in a network. | Discovering Global Patterns in Linguistic Networks through Spectral Analysis A Case Study of the Consonant Inventories Animesh Mukherjee Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur animeshm@ Monojit Choudhury and Ravi Kannan Microsoft Research India monojitc kannan @ Abstract Recent research has shown that language and the socio-cognitive phenomena associated with it can be aptly modeled and visualized through networks of linguistic entities. However most of the existing works on linguistic networks focus only on the local properties of the networks. This study is an attempt to analyze the structure of languages via a purely structural technique namely spectral analysis which is ideally suited for discovering the global correlations in a network. Application of this technique to PhoNet the co-occurrence network of consonants not only reveals several natural linguistic principles governing the structure of the consonant inventories but is also able to quantify their relative importance. We believe that this powerful technique can be successfully applied in general to study the structure of natural languages. 1 Introduction Language and the associated socio-cognitive phenomena can be modeled as networks where the nodes correspond to linguistic entities and the edges denote the pairwise interaction or relationship between these entities. The study of linguistic networks has been quite popular in the recent times and has provided us with several interesting insights into the nature of language see Choudhury and Mukherjee to appear for an extensive survey . Examples include study of the WordNet Sigman and Cecchi 2002 syntactic dependency network of words Ferrer-i-Cancho 2005 and network of co-occurrence of consonants in sound inventories Mukherjee et al. 2008 Mukherjee et al. 2007 . This research has been conducted during the author s internship at Microsoft Research India. Most of the existing studies on linguistic networks however focus .