Does network complexity help organize Babel's library?

TL;DR

This paper explores how complex network analysis of texts reveals topological properties that distinguish meaningful texts from encoded or senseless ones, based on word co-occurrence and grammatical features.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach to categorize texts by analyzing their complex network properties, linking topological features to text sense and encoding.

Findings

Texts display common complex network properties.

Certain properties depend on word frequency.

Other properties are determined by grammar.

Abstract

In this work, we study properties of texts from the perspective of complex network theory. Words in given texts are linked by co-occurrence and transformed into networks, and we observe that these display topological properties common to other complex systems. However, there are some properties that seem to be exclusive to texts; many of these properties depend on the frequency of words in the text, while others seem to be strictly determined by the grammar. Precisely, these properties allow for a categorization of texts as either with a sense and others encoded or senseless.