Co-occurrence network analysis of Chinese and English poems

A total of 572 co-occurrence networks of Chinese characters and words as well as English words are constructed from both Chinese and English poems. It is found that most of the networks have small-world features; more Chinese networks have scale-free properties and hierarchical structures as compared with the English networks; all the networks are disassortative, and the disassortativeness of the Chinese word networks is more prominent than those of the English networks; the spectral densities of the Chinese word networks and English networks are similar, but they are different from those of the ER, BA, and WS networks. For the above observed phenomena, analysis is provided with interpretation from a linguistic perspective.