Dear Ann,
Thanks for the reply. The basic problem is to rank words in the
dictionary by their "importance" in defining other words. In this
case, the frequency of use in a definition might be one crieterion.
But function words such as "the" would be far to frequent to be
useful. So in paring down the list, the second criterion is that the
word be used to define other "important" words. The pagerank
algorithm is an approach to finding the "centrality" or "authority"
of a page in a network. Originally the algorithm was used for
citation analysis - showing which articles are cited by articles that
are themselves cited by important articles, etc. In the linguistics
literature, the suggestion has been made that words used in the
definitions of other words are important. So the pagerank algorithm
seems like a good approach for analyzing the dictionary text.
Hope this helps,
Thanks,
Bob
>Date: Fri, 15 Nov 2013 16:43:46 -0500
>From: Ann Dupuis <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject: Re: Network analysis
>
>On Fri, Nov 15, 2013 at 3:48 PM, Robert Parks <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>> Greetings:
>> Does anyone know if any of the qualitative/quantitative text analysis
>> software packages include network analysis algorithms similar to "Pagerank"?
>> Thanks!
>> Bob Parks
>
>
>Can you tell us a little more about what you're looking for? What "problem"
>are you looking to solve? How do you envision such an algorithm working on
>qualitative text?
>
>--
>
>Ann Dupuis
>Researchware, Inc.
>Simply Powerful Tools for Qualitative Analysis
>Visit Researchware.com <http://www.researchware.com/>, and follow us on
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>------------------------------
>
>End of QUAL-SOFTWARE Digest - 14 Nov 2013 to 15 Nov 2013 (#2013-86)
>*******************************************************************
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