Advanced Songwriters (those who have won more than one mantel decoration in an official Song Challenge on the Mudcat or who have had comparable experience approved by the Divine Limeaid Goddess herself) are required to prepare an analysis of the following argument to demonstrate Senior Mastery of the subtleties of their art and its boundaries with genuine science:

Title: Global Organization of the Lexicon
Authors: Mariano Sigman and Guillermo Cecchi
Subj-class: Disordered Systems and Neural Networks

The lexicon consists of a set of word meanings and their semantic relationships. A systematic representation of the English lexicon based in psycholinguistic considerations has been put together in the database Wordnet in a long-term collaborative effort1. We present here a quantitative study of the graph structure of Wordnet in order to understand the global organization of the lexicon.

We find that semantic links follow power-law, scale-invariant behaviors typical of self-organizing networks. Polysemy, the ambiguity of an individual word, can act as a link in the semantic network, relating the different meanings of a common word. Inclusion of polysemous links has a profound impact in the organization of the semantic graph, converting it into a small world, with clusters of high traffic (hubs) representing abstract concepts. Our results show that polysemy organizes the semantic graph in a compact and categorical representation, and thus may explain the ubiquity of polysemy across languages.

The full paper is available on this site , and please note there WILL be a quiz!!

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