Comparison between the Structures of Word Co-occurrence and Word Similarity Networks for Ill-formed and Well-formed Texts in Taiwan Mandarin

Abstract

The study of word co-occurrence networks has attracted the attention of researchers due to their potential significance as well as applications. Understanding the structure of word co-occurrence networks is therefore important to fully realize their significance and usages. In past studies, word co-occurrence networks built on well-formed texts have been found to possess certain characteristics, including being small-world, following a two-regime power law distribution, and being generally disassortative. On the flip side, past studies have found that word co-occurrence networks built from ill-formed texts such as microblog posts may behave differently from those built from well-formed documents. While both kinds of word co-occurrence networks are small-world and disassortative, word co-occurrence networks built from ill-formed texts are scale-free and follow the power law distribution instead of the two-regime power law distribution. However, since past studies on the behavior of word co-occurrence networks built from ill-formed texts only investigated English, the universality of such characteristics remains to be seen among different languages. In addition, it is yet to be investigated whether there could be possible similitude/differences between word co-occurrence networks and other potentially comparable networks. This study therefore investigates and compares the structure of word co-occurrence networks and word similarity networks based on Taiwan Mandarin ill-formed internet forum posts and compare them with those built with well-formed judicial judgments, and seeks to find out whether the three aforementioned properties (scale-free, small-world, and disassortative) for ill-formed and well-formed texts are universal among different languages and between word co-occurrence and word similarity networks.