Constructional Complexity Analyzer

Project Description

The Constructional Complexity Analyzer (CCA) is a tool designed to measure the constructional diversity, constructional elaboration, and verbal diversity of English texts.

Features

CCA outputs various scores for the following indices:

1. Constructional Diversity

Calculates the following diversity measures based on constructions:

• Root TTR (RTTR; Guiraud, 1960)
• Herdan’s C (or log TTR; Chotlos, 1944; Herdan, 1960)
• Maas’ score (Maas, 1972)
• Moving-average type-token ratio (MATTR; Covington & McFall, 2010)
• Hypergeometric distribution diversity index (HD-D; McCarthy & Jarvis, 2007)
• Measure of textual lexical diversity (MTLD-Original; McCarthy, 2005; McCarthy & Jarvis, 2010)
• Moving-average bidirectional measure of textual lexical diversity (MTLD-MA-BI; McCarthy & Jarvis, 2010)
• Moving-average wrapped measure of textual lexical diversity (MT

2. Constructional Elaboration

Calculates the mean number of dependents (except punctuation marks) for individual constructions

3. Verb Inventory Size

Calculates log 10 [type frequency of verbs + 1 ] for individual constructions

Installation

1. Install spaCy

pip install spacy

python -m spacy download en_core_web_sm

2. Install Constructional Complexity Analyzer

pip install constructional_complexity_analyzer

3. Run the Analyzer

constructional-analysis /path/to/text_files

Citation

Hwang, H., & Kim, H. (2023). Automatic analysis of constructional diversity as a predictor of EFL students’ writing proficiency. Applied Linguistics, 44(1), 127–147. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amac046

Hwang, H. (in revision). Are the diversity measurement approaches proven effective for lexicon also suitable for syntax? Evaluating reliability and validity of ten constructional diversity indices. Journal of Second Language Writing.

License

This project is licensed under the
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).