Relationship between syntactic dependency and backbone structure of word co-occurrence networks

Strongly connected vertex pairs exist in various real-world networks. A set of such vertices and their connections in a network is sometimes referred to as the backbone of the network. The disparity filter is one of the methods for extracting these strongly connected vertex pairs from networks. In this study, we analyze the backbone networks of word co-occurrence networks generated from 244 English novels written by 18 authors from the perspective of syntactic dependency to elucidate the relationship between syntactic dependency and the backbone of word co-occurrence networks. Our findings indicate that vertex pairs extracted by the disparity filter from word co-occurrence networks are closely related to syntactic dependency.