Text Type Differentiation Based on the Structural Properties of Language Networks

Abstract

In this paper co-occurrence language network measures from literature and legal texts are compared on the global and on the local scale. Our dataset consists of four legal texts and four short novellas both written in English. For each text we construct one directed and weighted network, where weight of a link between two nodes represents overall co-occurrence frequencies of the corresponding words. We choose four literature-law pairs of texts with approximately the same number of different words for comparison. The aim of this experiment was to investigate how complex network measures operate in different structures of texts and which of them are sensitive to different text types. Our results show that on the global scale only average strength is the measure that exhibit some uniform behaviour due to the differences in textual complexity. In general, global measures may not be well suited to discriminate between mentioned genres of texts. However, local perspective rank plots of in and out selectivity (average node strength) indicate that there are more noticeable structural differences between legal texts and literature.