Robustness of sentence length measures in written texts

Vieira, Denner S.; Picoli, S.; Mendes, R. S.

doi:10.1016/j.physa.2018.04.104

Cited by 10 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 32 publications

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“…Words were selected as a unit of measure for sentence length primarily because of the simplicity and the great prevalence of this approach. It is necessary to note that according to [37], sentence length is robust with respect to the selection of the unit of measurement. Thus, the choice of the word (and, e.g., not letters) will not lead to a change in the results of further analysis.…”

Section: Data For Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Principle of Least Effort and Sentence Length in Public Speaking

Tsizhmovska

Martyushev

2021

Entropy

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The analysis of sentence lengths in the inaugural speeches of US presidents and the annual speeches of UK party leaders is carried out. Transcripts of the speeches are used, rather than the oral production. It is discovered that the average sentence length in these speeches decreases linearly with time, with the slope of 0.13 ± 0.03 words/year. It is shown that among the analyzed distributions (log-normal, folded and half normal, Weibull, generalized Pareto, Rayleigh) the Weibull is the best distribution for describing sentence length. These two results can be considered a consequence of the principle of least effort. The connection of this principle with the well-known principles of maximum and minimum entropy production is discussed.

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Section: Data For Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Principle of Least Effort and Sentence Length in Public Speaking

Tsizhmovska

Martyushev

2021

Entropy

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“…It means the introduction section, educational writing genre (Kawase, 2015) received the most grammatical complexity, and the methodology section was the least one. Though the current study did not focus on reasons for the grammatical complexity growth in 2016's English undergraduate theses, it is obvious that sentence length is a robust measure of sentence structure (Vieira, Picoli, & Mendes, 2018). This means that the growth of the MLS predicts undergraduate's improved writing.…”

Section: Grammatical Complexitymentioning

confidence: 91%

Language Effectiveness and Factors Influencing Scientific Writing of Indonesian Undergraduate Thesis

Dakhi

Hutabarat

2018

ERJEE

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The linguistic feature distinction between written and spoken discourse, like scientific writing, narrative text, discussion text, oral speech, etc. has been a longstanding discussion among scholars. However, there is limited number of studies on Indonesian undergraduate thesis context. This article reports the language effectiveness, i.e. lexical density and grammatical complexity of undergraduate thesis using the Flesch�s Analysis of the Readability of Adult Reading Materials (1974) and the determinant factors influencing them. This descriptive study, applying online system application, was conducted in an Indonesian pseudonym university. Forty-two undergraduate theses were used as data source of lexical density and grammatical complexity, and four English lecturers participated on interview. Results showed that the average lexical density ratio was 42.14 and the grammatical complexity was 14.54. On the other hand, the determinant factors of academic writing holistically encompass; (1) psychological factors including identity awareness, motivation, and conceptual competency, (2) sociocultural factor covering personal experience, and (3) linguistic factors, namely linguistic awareness and application, and mechanical competency. To sum up, three important conclusions are drawn. Firstly, there is no exactly the same lexical density and grammatical complexity across chapters of the undergraduate theses. Secondly, the undergraduate theses are lexically acceptable, but grammatically are not as they are interpreted as American students� slick fiction product. Finally, variables affecting academic writing are not only linguistic factors, but also psychological and sociocultural ones.Keywords: lexical density; grammatical complexity; undergraduate thesis; Indonesian context; academic writing; language effectiveness.

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“…An analysis of fractality of sentence-length series in several Western fictional texts revealed that, although most fictional texts show a long-range correlation, the degree of multifractality can vary quite substantially, ranging from monofractal to highly multifractal structure (Drożdż et al, 2016 ). Although sentence length can be measured in various ways, e.g., as the number of characters or words in unlemmatized and lemmatized texts, the different ways yield robust results that have comparable distributions and similar patterns of long-range correlations (Vieira et al, 2018 ). MFDFA has also been applied in empirical studies of reading (Wallot et al, 2014 ).…”

Section: Global Measures Of Variability and Self-similaritymentioning

confidence: 99%

Fractality and Variability in Canonical and Non-Canonical English Fiction and in Non-Fictional Texts

Mohseni

Gast²,

Redies

2021

Front. Psychol.

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This study investigates global properties of three categories of English text: canonical fiction, non-canonical fiction, and non-fictional texts. The central hypothesis of the study is that there are systematic differences with respect to structural design features between canonical and non-canonical fiction, and between fictional and non-fictional texts. To investigate these differences, we compiled a corpus containing texts of the three categories of interest, the Jena Corpus of Expository and Fictional Prose (JEFP Corpus). Two aspects of global structure are investigated, variability and self-similar (fractal) patterns, which reflect long-range correlations along texts. We use four types of basic observations, (i) the frequency of POS-tags per sentence, (ii) sentence length, (iii) lexical diversity, and (iv) the distribution of topic probabilities in segments of texts. These basic observations are grouped into two more general categories, (a) the lower-level properties (i) and (ii), which are observed at the level of the sentence (reflecting linguistic decoding), and (b) the higher-level properties (iii) and (iv), which are observed at the textual level (reflecting comprehension/integration). The observations for each property are transformed into series, which are analyzed in terms of variance and subjected to Multi-Fractal Detrended Fluctuation Analysis (MFDFA), giving rise to three statistics: (i) the degree of fractality () of the fractal spectrum. The statistics thus obtained are compared individually across text categories and jointly fed into a classification model (Support Vector Machine). Our results show that there are in fact differences between the three text categories of interest. In general, lower-level text properties are better discriminators than higher-level text properties. Canonical fictional texts differ from non-canonical ones primarily in terms of variability in lower-level text properties. Fractality seems to be a universal feature of text, slightly more pronounced in non-fictional than in fictional texts. On the basis of our results obtained on the basis of corpus data we point out some avenues for future research leading toward a more comprehensive analysis of textual aesthetics, e.g., using experimental methodologies.

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Robustness of sentence length measures in written texts

Cited by 10 publications

References 32 publications

Principle of Least Effort and Sentence Length in Public Speaking

Principle of Least Effort and Sentence Length in Public Speaking

Language Effectiveness and Factors Influencing Scientific Writing of Indonesian Undergraduate Thesis

Fractality and Variability in Canonical and Non-Canonical English Fiction and in Non-Fictional Texts

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