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Edited by Patrick Suppes, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, and approved November 8, 2001 (received for review July 5, 2001)
Abstract
The lexicon consists of a set of word meanings and their semantic relationships. A systematic representation of the English lexicon based in psycholinguistic considerations has been put together in the database Wordnet in a long-term collaborative effort. We present here a quantitative study of the graph structure of Wordnet to understand the global organization of the lexicon. Semantic links follow power-law, scale-invariant behaviors typical of self-organizing networks. Polysemy (the ambiguity of an individual word) is one of the links in the semantic network, relating the different meanings of a common word. Polysemous links have a profound impact in the organization of the semantic graph, conforming it as a small world network, with clusters of high traffic (hubs) representing abstract concepts such as line, head, or circle. Our results show that: (i) Wordnet has global properties common to many self-organized systems, and (ii) polysemy organizes the semantic graph in a compact and categorical representation, in a way that may explain the ubiquity of polysemy across languages.
Footnotes
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This paper was submitted directly (Track II) to the PNAS office.
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† To whom reprint requests should be addressed. E-mail: gcecchi{at}us.ibm.com.
- Received July 5, 2001.
- Copyright © 2002, The National Academy of Sciences
- *Laboratory of Mathematical Physics, Center for Studies in Physics and Biology and †Laboratory of Neurobiology, The Rockefeller University, 1230 York Avenue, New York, NY 10021; ‡Functional Neuroimaging Laboratory, Department of Psychiatry, Weill Medical College of Cornell University, 1300 York Avenue, New York, NY 10021, and § Biometaphorical Computing Group, T. J. Watson Research Center, IBM Research Division, PO Box 218, Route 134, Yorktown Heights, NY 10598
-
Edited by Patrick Suppes, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, and approved November 8, 2001 (received for review July 5, 2001)
Abstract
The lexicon consists of a set of word meanings and their semantic relationships. A systematic representation of the English lexicon based in psycholinguistic considerations has been put together in the database Wordnet in a long-term collaborative effort. We present here a quantitative study of the graph structure of Wordnet to understand the global organization of the lexicon. Semantic links follow power-law, scale-invariant behaviors typical of self-organizing networks. Polysemy (the ambiguity of an individual word) is one of the links in the semantic network, relating the different meanings of a common word. Polysemous links have a profound impact in the organization of the semantic graph, conforming it as a small world network, with clusters of high traffic (hubs) representing abstract concepts such as line, head, or circle. Our results show that: (i) Wordnet has global properties common to many self-organized systems, and (ii) polysemy organizes the semantic graph in a compact and categorical representation, in a way that may explain the ubiquity of polysemy across languages.
Footnotes
-
This paper was submitted directly (Track II) to the PNAS office.
-
† To whom reprint requests should be addressed. E-mail: gcecchi{at}us.ibm.com.
- Received July 5, 2001.
- Copyright © 2002, The National Academy of Sciences
Global organization of the Wordnet lexicon
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