The Semantic Network of the Spanish Dictionary During the Last Century: Structural Stability and Resilience

• Camilo Garrido ^[1] ; Claudio Gutierrez ^[1] ; Guillermo Soto ^[1]
  1. [1] Universidad de Chile

     Universidad de Chile

     Santiago, Chile

     
• Localización: Electronic lexicography in the 21st century. Proceedings of the eLex 2019 conference. 1-3 October 2019, Sintra, Portugal / Iztok Kosem (ed. lit.), Tanara Zingano Kuhn (ed. lit.), Margarita Correia (ed. lit.), José Pedro Ferreira (ed. lit.), Maarten Jansen (ed. lit.), Isabel Pereira (ed. lit.), Jelena Kallas (ed. lit.), Miloš Jakubíček (ed. lit.), Simon Krek (ed. lit.), Carole Tiberius (ed. lit.), 2019, págs. 831-848
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • The semantic network of a dictionary is a mathematical structure that represents relationships among words of a language. In this work, we study the evolution of the semantic network of the Spanish dictionary during the last century, beginning in 1925 until 2014. We analysed the permanence and changes of its structural properties, such as size of components, average shortest path length, and degree distribution. We found that global structural properties of the Spanish dictionary network are remarkably stable. In fact, if we remove all the labels from the network, networks from different editions of the Spanish dictionary are practically indistinguishable. On the other hand, local properties change over the years offering insights about the evolution of lexicon. For instance, the neighbourhood of a single word or the shared neighbourhood between a pair of words. This paper presents preliminary evidence that dictionary networks are an interesting language tool and good proxies to study semantic clouds of words and their evolution in a given language.