Topology of the conceptual network of language

TL;DR

This paper constructs and analyzes the conceptual network of the English language using thesaurus data, revealing small-world and scale-free properties that inform language structure and cognitive science.

Contribution

It provides a quantitative mapping of the English conceptual network, demonstrating its small-world and scale-free characteristics using real lexical data.

Findings

The network has a small average shortest path length.

It exhibits a scale-free, algebraic connectivity distribution.

The structure has implications for language evolution and cognition.

Abstract

We define two words in a language to be connected if they express similar concepts. The network of connections among the many thousands of words that make up a language is important not only for the study of the structure and evolution of languages, but also for cognitive science. We study this issue quantitatively, by mapping out the conceptual network of the English language, with the connections being defined by the entries in a Thesaurus dictionary. We find that this network presents a small-world structure, with an amazingly small average shortest path, and appears to exhibit an asymptotic scale-free feature with algebraic connectivity distribution.