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Summary

Degree is the simplest of the node-level measures, but its simplicity often hides its power. Here we will apply degree to the problem of mental structure. Specifically, what is the structure of the relationships between information in the mind? George Kingsley Zipf observed that word frequencies in natural language tend to a follow a scale-free distribution: The most frequent words are few, while the less frequent words are many with a specific linear relationship on a log-log plot. It has also been suggested that this power-law distribution applies to the relationships between words as well as to their meanings. Some words share meanings with many other words while others share few. This is a hypothesis based on the structural distribution of shared meanings, or polysemy (words with multiple meanings). This chapter will explain the theory underlying Zipf’s law of meaning and power laws. It will also show how we can combine these ideas with the most basic node-level network measure: degree.

Consider the random graph model of Barabási and Albert, where we add a new vertex in every step and connect it to some old vertices with probabilities proportional to their degrees. If we connect it to only one of the old vertices then this will be a tree. These graphs have been shown to have a power-law degree distribution, the same as that observed in some large real-world networks. We are interested in the width of the tree and we show that it is at the nth step; this also holds for a slight generalization of the model with another constant. We then see how this theoretical result can be applied to directory trees.

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4 - Zipf’s Law of Meaning: The Degree Distribution of the Mind

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Width of a scale-free tree

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4 - Zipf’s Law of Meaning: The Degree Distribution of the Mind

Summary

Width of a scale-free tree