Using complex network representation to identify important structural components of Chinese characters

Abstract

It has recently been shown that the Chinese character system can be treated as a complex network, in which the nodes represent written Chinese character components, and a connection between nodes indicates a structural relationship between the two corresponding components. This study explores the complex network formed by written Chinese components. We examine the considerations involved in generating such a network (boundary choice, weighting of edges and nodes, connectivity model, etc.). Treating these considerations as variables, we create several complex network representations of the Chinese writing system, and compare their resulting topologies. By analyzing these networks, we try to identify important written components and component clusters, and thereby gain insight into the best strategies for structure-based written Chinese vocabulary acquisition. Sample networks can be found at http://cse.unr.edu/∼mgunes/ Chinese/. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland.