Networks in the mind - What communities reveal about the structure of the lexicon
2021 (English)In: Open Linguistics, E-ISSN 2300-9969, Vol. 7, no 1, p. 181-199Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]
The mental lexicon stores words and information about words. The lexicon is seen by many researchers as a network, where lexical units are nodes and the different links between the units are connections. Based on the analysis of a word association network, in this article we show that different kinds of associative connections exist in the mental lexicon. Our analysis is based on a word association database from the agglutinative language Hungarian. We use communities - closely knit groups - of the lexicon to provide evidence for the existence and coexistence of different connections. We search for communities in the database using two different algorithms, enabling us to see the overlapping (a word belongs to multiple communities) and non-overlapping (a word belongs to only one community) community structures. Our results show that the network of the lexicon is organized by semantic, phonetic, syntactic and grammatical connections, but encyclopedic knowledge and individual experiences are also shaping the associative structure. We also show that words may be connected not just by one, but more types of connections at the same time.
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Walter de Gruyter, 2021. Vol. 7, no 1, p. 181-199
Keywords [en]
associations, communities, Hungarian, mental lexicon, multilayered network, networks
National Category
Natural Language Processing
Research subject
Machine Learning
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:ltu:diva-86096DOI: 10.1515/opli-2021-0012ISI: 000663774500001Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-85108093183OAI: oai:DiVA.org:ltu-86096DiVA, id: diva2:1574717
Funder
European Commission, 739574EU, Horizon 2020European Regional Development Fund (ERDF)
Note
Validerad;2021;Nivå 2;2021-06-29 (beamah);
Forskningsfinansiärer: Republic of Slovenia; Slovenian ARRS (N2-0171); European Cooperation in Science and Technology; European Social Fund
2021-06-292021-06-292025-02-07Bibliographically approved