Recently, Jean-Philippe Magué advised me of the newly introduced text stats on Amazon. A good summary by Gabe Habash on the news blog of Publishers Weekly describes the perspectives and the potential interest of this new software : Book Lies: Readability is Impossible to Measure. The stats seem to have been available since last summer. I decided to contribute to the discussion on Amazon’s text readability statistics : to what extent are they reliable and useful ?

Discussion

Gabe Habash compares several well-known books and concludes that the sentence length is determining in the readability measures used by Amazon. In fact, the …

Jean-Philippe Magué told me there was a Google advanced search filter that checked the result pages to give a readability estimate. In fact, it was introduced about seven months ago and works to my knowledge only for the English language (that’s also why I didn’t notice it).

Description

For more information, you can read the official help page. I also found two convincing blog posts showing how it works, one by the Unofficial Google System Blog and the other by Daniel M. Russell.

The most interesting bits of information I was able to find consist in a brief …

I could not follow the whole second day of the Workshop on Complexity in Language (see previous post), but here is what I heard in the morning.

Salikoko Mufwene talked about the emergence of complexity, which he sees as a self-organization process : we don’t plan the way we are going to speak.

He adopts a relativistic perspective speaking of a multi-agent system and asking if the agents are really agentive or if there are triggers of particular behaviors. He likes to consider language as a technology that evolved. At the end of the talk he also tackled the notion …

I attended yesterday the first day of a workshop organized by Salikoko Mufwene and held at the ENS Lyon. This “Workshop on Complexity in Language: Developmental and Evolutionary Perspectives” lasts two days: HTML version of the program.

Here is my personal report on what I heard during the first day and on what I found interesting.

Complexity and complexity science

First of all, William S.-Y. Wang referred to Herbert Simon and Melanie Mitchell in particular to define complexity, two approaches that I described on this blog.

Tom Schoenemann talked about the increasing richness, subtlety and complexity of hominin conceptual …

Sometimes you just feel lucky : I was reading the famous article by Charles J. Fillmore, “Corpus linguistics” or “Computer-aided armchair linguistics”, in the proceedings of a Nobel symposium which took place in 1991 (it is known for the introducing descriptions of the armchair and of the corpus linguist who don’t have anything to say to each other) as I decided to read the following article. The title did not seem promising to me, but still, it was written by Halliday :

M.A.K. Halliday, Language as system and language as instance: The corpus as a theoretical construct, pp. 61-77 …

Definition

Herbert A. Simon is one of the first who tried to formalize the notion of a complex system: * H. A. Simon, “The Architecture of Complexity”, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 106, iss. 6, pp. 467-482, 1962.

First of all, here is how he defines it:

« Roughly, by a complex system I mean one made up of a large number of parts that interact in a nonsimple way. In such systems, the whole is more than the sum of the parts, not in an ultimate, metaphysical sense, but in the important pragmatic sense that, given the properties of …

I just read with peculiar attention the seventh chapter of Complexity: A Guided Tour, by Melanie Mitchell (Defining and measuring complexity, pages 94 to 111). She works with the Santa Fe Institute which is a major institution regarding research on complex systems. She gives a convincing outlook of this field. Still, I did not read anything on the question of language as a complex adaptive system, although there are researchers who focus on this topic (e.g. in Santa Fe).

According to her, there are different sciences of complexity with different notions of what complexity means. The notion of complexity …

I just found a seminal article on complexity written by Renate Bartsch in 1973 (in German). It is a very good summary of the perspective on this topic at the beginning of the ‘70s. The generative grammar background research on language starts to be criticized, but it is still a landmark and a framework (most notably the reflexion on surface and deep structure).

R. Bartsch, “Gibt es einen sinnvollen Begriff von linguistischer Komplexität ?” Zeitschrift für Germanistische Linguistik, vol. 1, iss. 1, pp. 6-31, 1973.

Bartsch focuses on three main aspects of the problem to answer this question: does the idea …

Here is what I retain from my reading of this book: * E. Castello, Text Complexity and Reading Comprehension Tests, Bern: Peter Lang, 2008.

Notional framework

To begin with, Castello identifies two types of complexity, and states that research in this field attempts to quantify inherent complexity and receiver-oriented complexity, i.e. complexity or difficulty per se on one side and in terms of reader and text on the other.

He cites C.J. Alderson and L. Merlini Barbaresi (strangely enough, we are not related, as far as I know) for their definition of linguistic complexity, M. Halliday and T. Gibson …

I have selected a few papers on readability published in the last years, all available online (for instance using a specialized search engine, see previous post):

1. First of all, I reviewed this one last week, it is a very up-to-date article. L. Feng, M. Jansche, M. Huenerfauth, and N. Elhadad, “A Comparison of Features for Automatic Readability Assessment”, 2010, pp. 276-284.
2. The seminal paper to which Feng et al. often refers, as they combine several approaches, especially statistical language models, support vector machines and more traditional criteria. A comprehensive bibliography. S. E. Schwarm and M. Ostendorf, “Reading level assessment using …