Automated Evaluation of Text and Discourse with Coh-Metrix

Abstract

Coh-Metrix is among the broadest and most sophisticated automated textual assessment tools available today. Automated Evaluation of Text and Discourse with Coh-Metrix describes this computational tool, as well as the wide range of language and discourse measures it provides. Part I of the book focuses on the theoretical perspectives that led to the development of Coh-Metrix, its measures, and empirical work that has been conducted using this approach. Part II shifts to the practical arena, describing how to use Coh-Metrix and how to analyze, interpret, and describe results. Coh-Metrix opens the door to a new paradigm of research that coordinates studies of language, corpus analysis, computational linguistics, education, and cognitive science. This tool empowers anyone with an interest in text to pursue a wide array of previously unanswerable research questions.

ReaderBench Learns Dutch: Building a Comprehensive Automated Essay Scoring System for Dutch Language

“…T-Scan (http:// languagelink.let.uu.nl/tscan) is one of the most elaborated solutions as it considers multiple features, including [20]: lexical and sentence complexity, referential cohesion and lexical diversity, relational coherence, concreteness, personal style, verbs and time, verbs and time, as well as probability features, all derived from Coh-Metrix [21][22][23]. Besides T-Scan, various Dutch surface tools have been reported that provide lexical indices for text difficulty, as well as recommendations to reorganize the text: e.g., Texamen, Klinkende Taal and Accessibility Leesniveau Tool [24].…”

Evaluating Two High Intermediate EFL and ESL Textbooks: A Comparative Study Based on Readability Indices

“…The indices are categorized into nine measures. As it takes too much space to explain all these indices in detail here, the interested readers are referred to [33].…”

“…In contrast to non-narrative texts, narrative texts are written on more familiar topics, using oral language and more familiar words and world knowledge [33]. The higher the grade level of the text, the lower the narrativity index will be [19].…”

“…The higher the grade level of the text, the lower the narrativity index will be [19]. Syntactic Simplicity is, however, based on the assumption that that there are fewer words, and simpler and more familiar syntactic structures in a syntactically simple text [33]. According to Graesser et al [13], Coh-Metrix measures the degree of difficulty of the syntactic structure of the text in three ways: the mean number of Indices.…”

“…According to Graesser et al [13], Coh-Metrix measures the degree of difficulty of the syntactic structure of the text in three ways: the mean number of Indices. Sociol Int J 1 (3) As the third index, Word Concreteness assesses the proportion of content words in the text that are concrete and meaningful and evoke mental images, as opposed to abstract words that are difficult to visualize [33]. Referential Cohesion is high if words and ideas overlap across sentences and the whole text, that is, the ideas are more clearly connected to each other and the text will be more easily processed by the reader.…”