We demonstrate that polysemous links have a profound impact on the organization of thesemantic graph, conforming it as a small-world network, based on the data fromWordNet and A Thesaurus of Old English. We show that the words with higherfrequency and therefore with higher number of meanings construct the higher level of thehypernymy tree and this architecture is robust through the times. We then set our argumentation in an evolutionary perspective. We also suggest that the small-worldtopology of the brain has enhanced the small-world semantic configuration.
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