ILSA: an automated language complexity analysis tool for French

Abstract

Estimating language complexity is an important aspect of educational measurement and assessment that can be used, for instance, to control for unwanted variance due to language, or to provide students with texts that are conducive to learning. Automatic language processing techniques can be used to extract various linguistic features that reflect the complexity of vocabulary and sentence structure. In this paper, we present a new tool called ILSA (Integrated Lexico-Syntactic Analyzer), which we developed for research and educational applications. We summarize how the tool works and present the types of attributes it can extract. We then apply ILSA to 600 texts used in Quebec elementary and secondary schools and analyze the correlations between the attributes and the school grade associated with the text. The results show the potential of ILSA for modeling the complexity of French texts.

Keywords

• corpus analysis
• natural language processing
• readability
• psycholinguistics
• analyse de corpus
• traitement automatique du langage naturel
• lisibilité
• psycholinguistique
• français
• atributos de texto
• análise de corpus
• processamento automático da linguagem natural
• legibilidade
• francês