Abstract
Advances in computational linguistics and discourse processing have made it possible to automate many language- and text-processing mechanisms. We have developed a computer tool called Coh-Metrix, which analyzes texts on over 200 measures of cohesion, language, and readability. Its modules use lexicons, part-of-speech classifiers, syntactic parsers, templates, corpora, latent semantic analysis, and other components that are widely used in computational linguistics. After the user enters an English text, Coh-Metrix returns measures requested by the user. In addition, a facility allows the user to store the results of these analyses in data files (such as Text, Excel, and SPSS). Standard text readability formulas scale texts on difficulty by relying on word length and sentence length, whereas Coh-Metrix is sensitive to cohesion relations, world knowledge, and language and discourse characteristics.
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The research was supported by Institute for Education Sciences Grant IES R3056020018-02 and National Science Foundation Grant SES 9977969. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the IES or the NSF.
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Graesser, A.C., McNamara, D.S., Louwerse, M.M. et al. Coh-Metrix: Analysis of text on cohesion and language. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers 36, 193–202 (2004). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03195564
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03195564