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 …

I read an interesting article, “featuring” an up-to-date comparison of what is being done in the field of readability assessment:

“A Comparison of Features for Automatic Readability Assessment”, Lijun Feng, Martin Jansche, Matt Huenerfauth, Noémie Elhadad, 23rd International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING 2010), Poster Volume, pp. 276-284.

I am interested in the features they use. Let’s summarize, I am going to do a quick recension:

Corpus and tools

• Corpus: a sample from the Weekly Reader
• OpenNLP to extract named entities and resolve co-references
• the Weka learning toolkit for machine learning

Features

• Four subsets of discourse features:
1. entity-density …

Here is the beginning of a bibliography generated from my Master’s thesis, converted between different formats, and parked here for further reference.

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

Complexity and Linguistic Complexity Theory

• S. T. Piantadosi, H. Tily, and E. Gibson, “Word lengths are optimized for efficient communication”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 108, iss. 9, pp. 3526-3529, 2011.
• L. Maurits …