How Greek the Web Is

Internet, apart from a huge repository of information of any kind, has become the main means of modern communications and World Wide Web has emerged as a new sort of society since it usually reflects almost all aspects of modern societies in terms of their economic, political and social status and structure. Therein, over wired and wireless connections, through ingenious ideas, i.e., algorithms, that exploit the enclosed computational power, a new kind of culture emerges combing elements from existing traditional civilizations/cultures like for instance history, arts, science and technology, education, language... Motivated by the fundamental and influential nature of the Greek language, our paper investigates its influence in written texts hosted in the World Wide Web. Otherwise stated, our work addresses the question: How Greek the Web is? Our approach lies in automatically detecting and measuring the frequency of words of Greek origin in user-selected URLs; we focused on URLs including English text – but our work can be (easily) extended to URLs containing text in other languages. To this aim, we designed and implemented using python a cultural algorithm which, starting with a small collection of Greek lemmata and exemplars, is able to automatically generate and recognize new lemmata and English words of Greek origin in web texts. In addition, we designed and implemented a python-based application which using our cultural algorithm analyzes user-selected web texts in terms of content of Greek origin and visualizes analysis results. The application has been tested on a collection of web texts coming from education, development, science and technology indicating that, on average, 10% of the English words used is of Greek origin.