I already mentioned Amazon’s text stats in a post where I tried to explain why they were far from being useful in every situation: A note on Amazon’s text readability stats, published last December.

I found an example which shows particularly well why you cannot rely on these statistics when it comes to get a precise picture of a text’s readability. Here are the screenshots of text statistics describing two different books (click on them to display a larger view):

The two books look quite similar, except for the length of the second one, which seems to …

Last Monday, I released an updated version of both corpus and visualization tool on the occasion of the DGfS-CL Poster-Session in Frankfurt, where I presented a poster (in German).

The first version had been made available last summer and mentioned on this blog, cf this post: Introducing the German Political Speeches Corpus and Visualization Tool.

For stability, the resource is available at this permanent redirect: http://purl.org/corpus/german-speeches

Description

In case you don’t remember it or never heard of it, here is a brief description:

The resource presented here consists of speeches by the last German …

Document-driven and data-driven, standoff and inline

First of all, the intention of the encoding can be different. Richard Eckart summarizes two main trends: document-driven XML and data-driven XML. While the first uses an « inline approach » and is « usually easily human-readable and meaningful even without the annotations », the latter is « geared towards machine processing and functions like a database record. […] The order of elements often is meaningless. » (Eckart 2008 p. 3)

In fact, several choices of architecture depend on the goal of an annotation using XML. The main division regards standoff and inline XML (also : stand-off and in-line).

The Paula format …

As I am working on a new release of the German Political Speeches Corpus, I looked for a way to make web pages lighter. I have lots of repetitive information, so that a little JavaScript is helpful when it comes to save on file size. Provided that the DOM structure is available, there are elements that may be completed on load.

For example, there are span elements which include specific text. By catching them and testing them against a regular expression the script is able to add attributes (like a class) to the right ones. Without activating JavaScript one still …

I would like to write a word about the beginnings of computer-aided readability assessment research in Canada during the ‘90s, as they show interesting ways of thinking and measuring the complexity of texts.

Sato-Calibrage

Daoust, Laroche and Ouellet (1997) start from research on readability as it prevailed in the United States : they aim at finding a way to be able to assign a level to texts by linking them to a school level. They assume that the discourses of the school institutions are coherent and that they can be examined as a whole. Among other things, their criteria concern lexical …

How to build an efficient word list ? What are the limits of word frequency measures ? These issues are relevant to readability.

First, a word about the context : word lists are used to find difficulties and to try to improve the teaching material, whereas word frequency is used in psychological linguistics to measure cognitive processing. Thus, this topic deals with education science, psychological linguistics and corpus linguistics.

Coxhead’s Academic Word List

The academic word list by Averil Coxhead is a good example of this approach. He finds that students are not generally familiar with academic vocabulary, giving following examples : substitute …

Last week I had the chance to talk about complexity and readability with an experienced children’s books author, Sabine Ludwig (see also the page on the German Wikipedia). She has published around 30 books so far, as well as a dozen books which were translated from English to German. Some of them were awarded. The most successful one, Die schrecklichsten Mütter der Welt, had sold about 65.000 copies by the end of 2011 (although a few booksellers first thought it was unadapted to children). I was able to record the interview so that I could take extensive notes …

I contributed to the Anglicism of the Year award nominations. It is the second edition, the first was rather confidential but still got mentionned by the English-speaking press (e.g. by The Guardian).

The jury is once again chaired by Anatol Stefanowitsch, a professor in linguistics at Hamburg University. The selection of the final nominees will be relayed by a few German bloggers specialized in linguistics. I made it to the first nominees, but there was no selection so far, this phase goes till January 7th. News can be found on the official blog.

My suggestions are:

• das Handyticketsystem
• whistleblowen …

In a recent article about a readability checker prototype for italian, Felice Dell’Orletta, Simonetta Montemagni, and Giulia Venturi provide a good overview of current research on readability. Starting from the end of the article, I must say the bibliography is quite up-to-date and the authors offer an extensive review of criteria used by other researchers.

Tendencies in research

First of all, there is a growing tendency towards statistical language models. In fact, language models are used by Thomas François (2009) for example, who considers they are a more efficient replacement for the vocabulary lists used in readability formulas.

Secondly …

As I try to put my notes in order by the end of this year, I changed a series of references, most notably in the bibliography and in the links sections.

Bibliography

I just updated the bibliography, using new categories. I divided the references in two main sections:

Corpus Linguistics, Complexity and Readability Assessment

• Corpus Linguistics and Corpus Building
• Complexity and Linguistic Complexity Theory
• Text Comprehension and Readability Theory
• Readability Formulas
• Readability Assessment

Background

• General Linguistics
• Computational Linguistics
• Measurement Theory
• Philosophy of Language
• Philosophy of Technology
• Miscellaneous Tools
• Tagging and Marking

Links

First of all, I updated the links section …