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Assessing Text Readability Using Hierarchical Lexical Relations Retrieved from WordNet

並列摘要


Although some traditional readability formulas have shown high predictive validity in the r=0.8 range and above (Chall & Dale, 1995), they are generally not based on genuine linguistic processing factors, but on statistical correlations (Crossley et al., 2008). Improvement of readability assessment should focus on finding variables that truly represent the comprehensibility of text as well as the indices that accurately measure the correlations. In this study, we explore the hierarchical relations between lexical items based on the conceptual categories advanced from Prototype Theory (Rosch et al., 1976). According to this theory and its development, basic level words like guitar represent the objects humans interact with most readily. They are acquired by children earlier than their superordinate words like stringed instrument and their subordinate words like acoustic guitar. Accordingly, the readability of a text is presumably associated with the ratio of basic level words it contains. WordNet (Fellbaum, 1998), a network of meaningfully related words, provides the best online open source database for studying such lexical relations. Our study shows that a basic level noun can be identified by its ratio of forming compounds (e.g. chair→armchair) and the length difference in relation to its hyponyms. We compared graded readings for American children and high school English readings for Taiwanese students by several readability formulas and in terms of basic level noun ratios (i.e. the number of basic level noun types divided by the number of noun types in a text). It is suggested that basic level noun ratios provide a robust and meaningful index of lexical complexity, which is directly associated with text readability.

參考文獻


Coh-Metrix (Version 2.0) (Software)
edHelper. com, Reading Comprehensions
NLTK version 0.9.5 (Natural Language Toolkit)
Software
WordNet, version 3.0.

被引用紀錄


Lin, S. Y. (2010). 以計算語言學方法研究英文的認知基本名詞 [doctoral dissertation, National Taiwan Normal University]. Airiti Library. https://www.airitilibrary.com/Article/Detail?DocID=U0021-1610201315213292
胡夢珂(2011)。使用支援向量機進行中文文本可讀性分類-以國小國語課文為例〔碩士論文,國立臺灣師範大學〕。華藝線上圖書館。https://www.airitilibrary.com/Article/Detail?DocID=U0021-1610201315250667

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