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Diachronic Changes in Text Complexity in 20th Century English Language: An NLP Approach

What it is about

The paper measures four text complexity features on the Brown family texts: average sentence length, the Automated Readability Index, sentence complexity (simple against complex sentences, by the number of finite predicators) and the share of passive constructions. The texts are parsed with a commercial parser. British texts from 1931, 1961 and 1991 are compared, and American texts from 1961 and 1992, genre by genre. Because most genres fail the normality test, the Kolmogorov-Smirnov Z test is used. Sentence length falls significantly in several genres of both varieties over 1961–1991/2, but a fall in length does not always mean a fall in complexity. Passive use falls in most significant genres; Press: Reportage shows the same fall in both varieties. The readability index changes significantly in few genres.

Ideas

For Mova

The relevant chapters are 21. The simple clause (finite clauses) and 28. Voice and the passive (passives). The code is en/src/parse.rs and the en parse-eval command. The measures: the four feature values per text and the normality-based choice of test.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@inproceedings{stajner2012diachronic,
  title = {{Diachronic Changes in Text Complexity in 20th Century English Language: An NLP Approach}},
  author = {Štajner, Sanja and Mitkov, Ruslan},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12)},
  year = {2012},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/L12-1172/}
}

References

25 references, 1 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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