The community structure of word co-occurrence networks: Experiments with languages from the Americas

Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso - Valparaíso, Chile

^(a) javier.vera@pucv.cl (corresponding author)

Received: 5 May 2021
Accepted: 8 June 2021

Abstract

We study a set of algorithms to discover the community structure of networks for languages from the Americas. Our experiments are based on a parallel corpus which allows us to represent each language as a co-occurrence network. Four methods to calculate network modularity, as a measure of the quality of community structure, were used. We studied several aspects of the community structure of co-occurrence networks. First, we were able to construct the map of modularity variations across languages from the Americas. With this, we separated large groups of languages into low- and high-modularity families. We suggested also a strong influence of functional words on low-modularity languages. Finally, we found a strong relationship between word entropy values and modularity. Our approach is thus a simple network-based contribution to face data scarcity of languages which are in danger of disappearing.