Ströbel Marcus


2016

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CoCoGen - Complexity Contour Generator: Automatic Assessment of Linguistic Complexity Using a Sliding-Window Technique
Ströbel Marcus | Elma Kerz | Daniel Wiechmann | Stella Neumann
Proceedings of the Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Linguistic Complexity (CL4LC)

We present a novel approach to the automatic assessment of text complexity based on a sliding-window technique that tracks the distribution of complexity within a text. Such distribution is captured by what we term “complexity contours” derived from a series of measurements for a given linguistic complexity measure. This approach is implemented in an automatic computational tool, CoCoGen – Complexity Contour Generator, which in its current version supports 32 indices of linguistic complexity. The goal of the paper is twofold: (1) to introduce the design of our computational tool based on a sliding-window technique and (2) to showcase this approach in the area of second language (L2) learning, i.e. more specifically, in the area of L2 writing.