Language comparison via network topology
Table 1: Differences between selected network-topology metrics across languages. The values are computed as L2-L1, or reported as L2 relative to L1.
['Language pair', '#Nodes', '#Edges', 'Mean degree', 'Density (⋅10−4)', 'MaxCom', 'MeanCom', 'Clustering', 'CC', '[ITALIC] Ndiff (%)', '[ITALIC] Ediff (%)']
We compared the pairs of languages as follows. For each of the two languages, we transformed the text into a network. The discussed network topology metrics were computed for each of the two networks. In the latter, the cells are colored according to the absolute difference in a given metric for readability purposes. Thus, the final result of the considered analysis are differences in a selected network topology metric. In this section we present the results of cross-lingual comparison. The measures given in the table are the differences in: #Nodes — the number of nodes #Edges — the number of edges, Mean degree — The differences in the table are presented in L2-L1 absolute differences, while for nodes and edges we also present the differences as relative percentages of the e.g., number of nodes of the second language It can be observed that some language pairs differ substantially even if only node counts are considered, where EN-FI is the pair with the largest difference, which is not surprising. English is for example an analytical language, while Finnish agglutinative with very rich morphology. Further, some of the metrics indicate groupings, which can be further investigated using heatmaps and direct visualization of language-language links.