It is supposed that if the MCL is applied to word association or co-occurrence data it will yield concept clusters where words are classified according to similar topics or similar meanings as paradigms.
because the word distribution of a corpus approximately follows Zipf's law and produces a small-world scale-free network (Steyvers et al., 2005), the MCL will result in a biased distribution of cluster sizes, with a few extraordinarily large core clusters that lack any particular features.