DESIGN METHODOLOGY LEXICO-SEMANTIC GRAPHS WITH THE HELP OF THE GEPHI COMPUTER PROGRAM

Abstract

The article examines the problems of searching various formal models that are able to reflect
fragments of the surrounding reality as structures of consciousness of speakers of a certain language.
Graphs were established to be the most suitable for formalizing knowledge about fragments of existence
among such models. The construction of graphs reproduces the relationship between the components of
these fragments. The author made an excursion into the theory of graphs, characterized their typology and
revealed possibilities of using graphs in linguistic studies, in particular for the formalization of elements
of the phonological, morphological, syntactic and lexico-semantic language levels.
The developed methodical algorithm for constructing a graph of the lexico-semantic field of the
pandemic using the Gephi computer programme helped to visualize the structure of the lexico-semantic
field and the relationship between its core and periphery, as well as to measure the degree of semantic
density of the elements of the lexico-semantic field. The research showed the following advantages
of the selected computer programme: support for the Windows operating system; simplicity and userfriendliness; possibility to upload the necessary document to the system (CSV file), which facilitates
the user’s work, because it is not necessary to manually enter data about vertices and edges into the
programme; preview of the constructed graph and editing of its elements; saving in a special format for
further display of the interactive graph on the Internet. The selected programme was used to construct a
complex undirected lexico-semantic graph with a vertex pandemic.