LaNCoA: A Python toolkit for Language Networks Construction and Analysis

In this paper we describe LaNCoA, Language Networks Construction and Analysis toolkit implemented in Python. The toolkit provides various procedures for network construction from the text: on the word-level (co-occurrence networks, syntactic networks, shuffled networks), and on the subword-level (syllable networks, grapheme networks). Furthermore, we implement functions for the language networks analysis on the global and local level. The toolkit is organized in several modules that enable various aspects of language analysis: analysis of global network measures for different co-occurrence window, comparison of networks based on original and shuffled texts, comparison of networks constructed on different language levels, etc. Text manipulation methods, like corpora cleaning, lemmatization and stopwords removal, are also implemented. For the basic network representation we use available NetworkX functions and methods. However, language network analysis is specific and it requires implementation of additional functions and methods. That was the main motivation for this research.