Preliminary Report on the Structure of Croatian Linguistic Co-occurrence Networks

Abstract: In this article, we investigate the structure of Croatian linguistic co-occurrence networks. We examine the change of network structure properties by systematically varying the co-occurrence window sizes, the corpus sizes and removing stopwords. In a co-occurrence window of size $n$ we establish a link between the current word and $n-1$ subsequent words. The results point out that the increase of the co-occurrence window size is followed by a decrease in diameter, average path shortening and expectedly condensing the average clustering coefficient. The same can be noticed for the removal of the stopwords. Finally, since the size of texts is reflected in the network properties, our results suggest that the corpus influence can be reduced by increasing the co-occurrence window size.