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Abstract

We demonstrate that polysemous links have a profound impact on the organization of the semantic graph, conforming it as a small-world network, based on the data from WordNet and A Thesaurus of Old English. We then show that the words with higher frequency and therefore with higher number of meanings construct the higher level of the hypernymy tree and this architecture is robust through the times. We suggest that our quantitative analysis of structural connection patterns in semantic networks provides insights into the functioning of neural architectures in the human brain. Furthermore, we discuss that vast quantities of variable and random utterances are converted into a small-world of fixed forms with fixed meanings by the cooperation between humans in the emergence of lexicon.

@incollection{ogura08evolang7th,
  author={Mieko Ogura and William S-Y. Wang},
  title={Evolution of the Global Organization of the Lexicon},
  year={2008},
  month={March},
  pages={243-250},
  editor={A. D. M. Smith and K. Smith and R. Ferrer-i-Cancho},
  publisher={World Scientific},
  booktitle={Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on the Evolution of Language},
  url={http://www.isrl.uiuc.edu/~amag/langev/paper/ogura08evolang7th.html}
}