Platform for the analysis of written texts in terms of conceptual graphs: study case, Cybernetics of Cybernetics course

Abstract

The objective of this work is to observe and analyze the conceptual-relation structures in texts written in Spanish, from the perspective of second-order cybernetics. Texts are shaped by the syntactic structure of the sentences they contain. Conceptual-relationships emerge by transforming the text, using a text analysis platform named PAST. The transformation is guided by a set of established rules, permitting to observe a system. PAST can be defined as a powerful operator to transform texts written by the students in a Master's Program class. The platform is introduced as a tool enabling a graph representation of relationships among the concepts in the text. The internal procedure of the platform and the graph construction concerns the linguistic analysis. Although the resulting graphic representation does not follow a formal definition, it reflects an iterative construction to define a topology to create a semantic network. This network only makes sense to the author of the text. In other words, the author (observer), based on the cybernetics of the observing systems, uses a tool that enables him to make a second-order observation of a document that he/she has linearly written. The main epistemological concepts mentioned throughout the development of the proposal are discourse and distinction. The contribution of this work is the application of a methodology that conducts a recursive observation of both the direct and indirect relationships established by the words the author puts together in his/her written discourse. In the discussion of results the next phases of this work are presented.

Keywords

• Speech
• Distinction
• Conceptual Graph
• Semantics
• Cybernetics
• Observer