Study on co-occurrence character networks from Chinese essays in different periods

Co-occurrence networks of Chinese characters are constructed from collections of essays in different periods of China: the ancient Chinese language, the Chinese language in Wei, Jin, and Southern-Northern Dynasties, the recent Chinese language, and the modern Chinese language, and their statistical parameters are studied. It has been found that 99. 6% networks have the scale-free feature and 95. 0% networks have the smallworld effect. This study reveals some commonalities and differences among articles in different periods of China from a complex network perspective. There has been a controversial question as to whether the literatures in Wei, Jin, and Southern-Northern Dynasties should belong to the ancient Chinese language or the recent Chinese language in the linguistic study. Our work shows that the statistical parameters of networks in Wei, Jin, and Southern-Northern Dynasties are clearly different from those of networks in the other periods of China, and it seems more reasonable that the literatures in Wei, Jin, and Southern-Northern Dynasties belong to the recent Chinese language. © 2012 Science China Press and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.