Geography of Social Ontologies: Testing a Variant of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis in the Context of Wikipedia

Geography of Social Ontologies: Testing a Variant of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis in the Context of Wikipedia - scientific work related to Wikipedia quality published in 2011, written by Alexander Mehler, Olga Pustylnikov and Nils Diewald.

Overview

In this article, authors test a variant of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis in the area of complex network theory. This is done by analyzing social ontologies as a new resource for automatic language classification. Authors method is to solely explore structural features of social ontologies in order to predict family resemblances of languages used by the corresponding communities to build these ontologies. This approach is based on a reformulation of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis in terms of distributed cognition. Starting from a corpus of 160 Wikipedia-based social ontologies, authors test variant of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis by several experiments, and find out that authors outperform the corresponding baselines. All in all, the article develops an approach to classify linguistic networks of tens of thousands of vertices by exploring a small range of mathematically well-established topological indices.