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 …

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 …

I am currently working on a resource I would like to introduce : the German Political Speeches Corpus (no acronym apart from GPS). It consists in speeches by the last German Presidents and Chancellors as well as a few ministers, all gathered from official sources.

As far I as know no such corpus was publicly available for German. Most speeches could not be found on Google until today (which is bound to change). It can be freely republished.

The two main corpora (Presidency and Chancellery) are released in XML format basing on raw text and metadata.

There is a series of …

Lord Kelvin

Here is what William Thompson, better known as Lord Kelvin, once said about measure:

« I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely in your thoughts advanced to the state of Science, whatever the matter may be. »
William Thompson, Lecture on “Electrical Units of Measurement” (3 May 1883)

Bachelard

I found …

What do people look for ? A few years ago it would have been difficult to gather information at a large scale and grab it with a powerful, yet more or less objective tool. Nowadays a single company is able to know what you want, what you buy or what you just did. And sometimes it shares a little bit of the data.

So, the end of the year gives me an occasion to try and discover changes in the mentalities using the ready-to-use Google Trends. Just for fun…

How does research compare with other interests ?

First of all, research is …