The complexity of Chinese syntactic dependency networks

This paper proposes how to build a syntactic network based on syntactic theory and presents some statistical properties of Chinese syntactic dependency networks based on two Chinese treebanks with different genres. The results show that the two syntactic networks are small-world networks, and their degree distributions obey a power law. The finding, that the two syntactic networks have the same diameter and different average degrees, path lengths, clustering coefficients and power exponents, can be seen as an indicator that complexity theory can work as a means of stylistic study. The paper links the degree of a vertex with a valency of a word, the small world with the minimized average distance of a language, that reinforces the explanations of the findings from linguistics.