Statistical techniques that analyze texts, referred to as text analytics, have departed from the use of simple word count statistics towards a new paradigm. Text mining now hinges on a more sophisticated set of methods, including the representations in terms of complex networks. While well-established word-adjacency (co-occurrence) methods successfully grasp syntactical features of written texts, they are unable to represent important aspects of textual data, such as its topical structure, i.e. the sequence of subjects developing at a mesoscopic level along the text. Such aspects are often overlooked by current methodologies. In order to grasp the mesoscopic characteristics of semantical content in written texts, we devised a network model which is able to analyze documents in a multi-scale fashion. In the proposed model, a limited amount of adjacent paragraphs are represented as nodes, which are connected whenever they share a minimum semantical content. To illustrate the capabilities of our model, we present, as a case example, a qualitative analysis of "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland". We show that the mesoscopic structure of a document, modeled as a network, reveals many semantic traits of texts. Such an approach paves the way to a myriad of semantic-based applications. In addition, our approach is illustrated in a machine learning context, in which texts are classified among real texts and randomized instances.

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Abstract-Concepts and methods of complex networks can be used to analyse texts at their different complexity levels. Examples of natural language processing (NLP) tasks studied via topological analysis of networks are keyword identification, automatic extractive summarization and authorship attribution. Even though a myriad of network measurements have been applied to study the authorship attribution problem, the use of motifs for text analysis has been restricted to a few works. The goal of this paper is to apply the concept of motifs, recurrent interconnection patterns, in the authorship attribution task. The absolute frequencies of all thirteen directed motifs with three nodes were extracted from the co-occurrence networks and used as classification features. The effectiveness of these features was verified with four machine learning methods. The results show that motifs are able to distinguish the writing style of different authors. In our best scenario, 57.5% of the books were correctly classified. The chance baseline for this problem is 12.5%. In addition, we have found that function words play an important role in these recurrent patterns. Taken together, our findings suggest that motifs should be further explored in other related linguistic tasks.

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The vast amount of data and increase of computational capacity have allowed the analysis of texts from several perspectives, including the representation of texts as complex networks. Nodes of the network represent the words, and edges represent some relationship, usually word co-occurrence. Even though networked representations have been applied to study some tasks, such approaches are not usually combined with traditional models relying upon statistical paradigms. Because networked models are able to grasp textual patterns, we devised a hybrid classifier, called labelled motifs, that combines the frequency of common words with small structures found in the topology of the network, known as motifs. Our approach is illustrated in two contexts, authorship attribution and translationese identification. In the former, a set of novels written by different authors is analyzed. To identify translationese, texts from the Canadian Hansard and the European parliament were classified as to original and translated instances. Our results suggest that labelled motifs are able to represent texts and it should be further explored in other tasks, such as the analysis of text complexity, language proficiency, and machine translation.