CoCoGen - Complexity Contour Generator: Automatic Assessment of Linguistic Complexity Using a Sliding-Window Technique

Ströbel Marcus, Elma Kerz, Daniel Wiechmann, Stella Neumann


Abstract
We present a novel approach to the automatic assessment of text complexity based on a sliding-window technique that tracks the distribution of complexity within a text. Such distribution is captured by what we term “complexity contours” derived from a series of measurements for a given linguistic complexity measure. This approach is implemented in an automatic computational tool, CoCoGen – Complexity Contour Generator, which in its current version supports 32 indices of linguistic complexity. The goal of the paper is twofold: (1) to introduce the design of our computational tool based on a sliding-window technique and (2) to showcase this approach in the area of second language (L2) learning, i.e. more specifically, in the area of L2 writing.
Anthology ID:
W16-4103
Volume:
Proceedings of the Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Linguistic Complexity (CL4LC)
Month:
December
Year:
2016
Address:
Osaka, Japan
Editors:
Dominique Brunato, Felice Dell’Orletta, Giulia Venturi, Thomas François, Philippe Blache
Venue:
CL4LC
SIG:
Publisher:
The COLING 2016 Organizing Committee
Note:
Pages:
23–31
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W16-4103
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ströbel Marcus, Elma Kerz, Daniel Wiechmann, and Stella Neumann. 2016. CoCoGen - Complexity Contour Generator: Automatic Assessment of Linguistic Complexity Using a Sliding-Window Technique. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Linguistic Complexity (CL4LC), pages 23–31, Osaka, Japan. The COLING 2016 Organizing Committee.
Cite (Informal):
CoCoGen - Complexity Contour Generator: Automatic Assessment of Linguistic Complexity Using a Sliding-Window Technique (Marcus et al., CL4LC 2016)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W16-4103.pdf