Can someone who has more of a network theory background say why this would be interesting? From an NLP angle, both what they're doing (text classification) and

Can someone who has more of a network theory background say why this would be interesting? From an NLP angle, both what they're doing (text classification) and how they're doing it (constructing a co-occurrence matrix) don't sound particularly novel nor do the network-theoretic properties they get from the unweighted, undirected form of the co-occurrence matrix seem to give any valuable insights. As a comparison, see the 2009 workshop on text graphs http://www.textgraphs.org/ws10/index.html http://www.textgraphs.org/ws10/index.html or papers such as Gaume et al (2007) Semantic associations and confluences in paradigmatic networks http://w3.erss.univ-tlse2.fr/textes/pagespersos/gaume/resources/Gaume_Duvignau_Vanhove_final.pdf http://w3.erss.univ-tlse2.fr/textes/pagespersos/gaume/resour... Did I mention that the physics people totally ignore all the (interesting and non-trivial) existing literature on the topic? It's a bit as if a CS/NLP person would write a paper on an information-theoretic approach to physics while totally ignoring the physics bits in it.