Comparing Network Centrality Measures as Tools for Identifying Key Concepts in Complex Networks: A Case of Wikipedia
Neven Matas, Sanda Martinčić-Ipšić, Ana Meštrović · Journal of Digital Information Management · 2017
Network centralities are amongst the most important measures for tracking and locating crucial nodes in a network.In this paper, we propose a general approach for identifying the most suitable centrality measure for detecting key concepts in a semantic or linguistic network.We experiment with seven network centrality measures (degree centrality, betweenness centrality, closeness centrality, eigenvector centrality, current-flow betweenness centrality, current-flow closeness centrality and communicability centrality).For the purpose of evaluation, we compare the original Wikipedia hyperlink network with a constructed concept network.The obtained results indicate that all seven used measures have good potential for identifying key terms, and that degree centrality achieves the best score.A good score is also obtained for current-flow betweenness centrality and current-flow closeness centrality.