In Search of a Bridge Between Network Analysis in Computational Linguistics and Computational Biology - A Conceptual Note

Recently, the inference of biological networks has been studied whose vertices represent proteins and recurrent sequential patterns – called domain types – thereof; cf., for example, [1]. What makes this an outstanding research object from the point of view of data mining is the explorative analysis of large networks whose emergence is simulated in order to get insights into the dynamics of the focal area. This research program is connected to analyzing informational and, especially, textual networks as explored in the area of text mining. Consequently, the question is put forward which graph representation model is common to both areas of investigation. This paper addresses this question from the perspective of network motifs [2]. It reconstructs this notion from the point of view of syntagmatic and paradigmatic learning in computational linguistics. As an epiphenomenon, the paper sheds light on the applicability of text mining procedures in the area of bioinformatics.