Cluster Analysis and Visualization for the Legend of the Condor Heroes Based on Social Network

Abstract

The Legend of the Condor Heroes (LCH) is one of the fifteen well-known Wuxia novels penned by Jin Yong. It portrays a number of characters in the background of the Southern Song Dynasty. In this research, we attempt to analyze the relationship of characters in LCH based on social network, including network feature analysis, cluster analysis, and data visualization. Moreover, the approach can be extended to other literary works because our research provides a general framework for analyzing character relationships. We first perform lexical analysis on the corpus to extract character names and then utilize co-word analysis to build a social network of character relationships. We reckon characters as nodes and count the cooccurrences of characters as weights of links. By applying the social network analysis of created network, we can obtain network features of LCH. Furthermore, a hierarchical clustering algorithm is implemented to study the structure of LCH network. Both the dendrogram and Venn diagram are used for data visualization. An improved approach of visualizing the clustering results is advanced in order to display the group and hierarchical structure better. The final experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method shows a good effect.

Network Extraction and Analysis of Character Relationships in Chinese Literary Works

“…Network density assesses the relative denseness of a network from the perspective of connected links. In a network, density is the portion of potential links which actually exist in the network [ 8 ]. It is often used in social networks to measure the intensity of social relationships and trends in evolution.…”

“…Wang et al [ 7 ] utilized co-word and social network analyses to study old Chinese literature in the Qing Dynasty. Fan et al [ 8 ] examined character relationships in a classical Chinese novel by combining social network and cluster analysis.…”