  The use of methods borrowed from statistics and physics to analyze written
texts has allowed the discovery of unprecedent patterns of human behavior and
cognition by establishing links between models features and language structure.
While current models have been useful to unveil patterns via analysis of
syntactical and semantical networks, only a few works have probed the relevance
of investigating the structure arising from the relationship between relevant
entities such as characters, locations and organizations. In this study, we
represent entities appearing in the same context as a co-occurrence network,
where links are established according to a null model based on random, shuffled
texts. Computational simulations performed in novels revealed that the proposed
model displays interesting topological features, such as the small world
feature, characterized by high values of clustering coefficient. The
effectiveness of our model was verified in a practical pattern recognition task
in real networks. When compared with traditional word adjacency networks, our
model displayed optimized results in identifying unknown references in texts.
Because the proposed representation plays a complementary role in
characterizing unstructured documents via topological analysis of named
entities, we believe that it could be useful to improve the characterization of
written texts (and related systems), specially if combined with traditional
approaches based on statistical and deeper paradigms.
