Hierarchical Structure in Semantic Networks of Japanese Word Associations

This paper reports on the application of network analysis approaches to investigate the characteristics of graph representations of Japanese word associations. Two semantic networks are constructed from two separate Japanese word association databases. The basic statistical features of the networks indicate that they have scale-free and small-world properties and that they exhibit hierarchical organization. A graph clustering method is also applied to the networks with the objective of generating hierarchical structures within the semantic networks. The method is shown to be an efficient tool for analyzing large-scale structures within corpora. As a utilization of the network clustering results, we briefly introduce two web-based applications: the first is a search system that highlights various possible relations between words according to association type, while the second is to present the hierarchical architecture of a semantic network. The systems realize dynamic representations of network structures based on the relationships between words and concepts.