Social Network of Co-occurrence in News Articles

Networks describe various complex natural systems including social systems. Recent studies have shown that these networks share some common properties. While studying complex systems, data collection phase is difficult for social networks compared to other networks such as the WWW, Internet, protein or linguistic networks. Many interesting social networks such as movie actors’ collaboration, scientific collaboration and sexual contacts have been studied in the literature. It has been shown that they have small-world and power-law degree distribution properties. In this paper, we investigate an interesting social network of co-occurrence in news articles with respect to small-world and power-law degree distribution properties. 3000 news articles selected from Reuters-21578 corpus, which consists of news articles that appeared in the Reuters newswire in 1987 are used as the data set. Results reveal that like the previously studied social networks the social network of co-occurrence in news articles also possesses the small-world and power-law degree distribution properties.