Co-occurrence network analysis of modern Chinese poems

Abstract

A total of 606 co-occurrence networks of Chinese characters and words are constructed from rhymes, free verses, and prose poems. It is found that 98.5% of networks have scale-free properties, while 19.8% of networks do not have small-world features, especially the clustering coefficients in 5.6% of networks are zero. In addition, 61.4% of networks have significant hierarchical structures, and 98% of networks are disassortative. For the above observed phenomena, analysis is provided with interpretation from a linguistic perspective.