Alexander Mehler

Linguistic networks: Text-technological representation and quantitative analysis

With the advent of Web 2.0, we observe the rise of linguistic units that because of their structure, size and complexity have been widely unstudied so far. This relates to large complex networks of textual units and their collaborative generation by communities of interacting agents by means of computer-mediated communication. Amongst others, this includes wiki-based systems in scientific and knowledge communication. These examples have in common that they enable users to cooperate in generating and modifying nodes of text networks mostly without central control. In this talk, we investigate several examples of such linguistic networks. We start with so called social ontologies in order to shed light on emergent semantics and the kind of topology it brings about. Secondly, we ask for the self-similarity of linguistic networks as exemplified by Wikipedia's article network. Finally, we investigate laws of the collaboration of those agents who generate these networks in order to get insights into web-based collaboration as manifested by Wikipedia and numerous special purpose wikis.

Alexander Mehler is professor at the Text Technology Lab of the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main. His research focuses on quantitative computational methods, for instance on semantics, multimodal corpora, and parallel corpora. Web site http://www.hucompute.org/team/21

Where and when:

14:30-16:30 Jan 31, 2013

MPI Nijmegen, room 163

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