[Article] Does network complexity help organize Babel’s library?

[MarcoP]

I haven't finished reading the paper yet, but it does look interesting. They compute a number of measures, with the goal of recognizing linguistic texts from non-linguistic texts. The measures are based on undirected graphs were words that appear next to each other are connected by an edge.

The plot on the left (Fig.5) is Mean Clustering, for the original text on the X axis and a word-scrambled version on the Y axis.

Meaning of the dots:
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (black triangles), classic books (blue squares), computer codes (yellow squares) and “Voynich manuscript” (red square).

In all linguistic samples (black and blue), the original text has considerably higher C than the scrambled text. For the Voynich ms, this is only marginally true. Computer Codes are somehow intermediate between the VMS and linguistic texts.

The graph on the right (Fig.8) plots Z-score(Assortativity) vs number of network edges E correlation. Also in this case, the VMS appears to behave differently from the other samples.

I am thinking of trying to replicate some of these experiments: in particular, the graph on the left shows such a coherent trend for all texts... but I am not sure I will find the time and energy to do so.