neosca 0.0.25

Another syntactic complexity analyzer of written English language samples

NeoSCA

Another syntactic complexity analyzer of written English language samples.

NeoSCA is a rewrite of Xiaofei Lu's L2 Syntactic Complexity Analyzer, supporting Windows, macOS, and Linux. The same as L2SCA, NeoSCA takes written English language samples in plain text format as input, and computes:

the frequency of 9 structures in the text:

1. words (W)
2. sentences (S)
3. verb phrases (VP)
4. clauses (C)
5. T-units (T)
6. dependent clauses (DC)
7. complex T-units (CT)
8. coordinate phrases (CP)
9. complex nominals (CN), and

14 syntactic complexity indices of the text:

1. mean length of sentence (MLS)
2. mean length of T-unit (MLT)
3. mean length of clause (MLC)
4. clauses per sentence (C/S)
5. verb phrases per T-unit (VP/T)
6. clauses per T-unit (C/T)
7. dependent clauses per clause (DC/C)
8. dependent clauses per T-unit (DC/T)
9. T-units per sentence (T/S)
10. complex T-unit ratio (CT/T)
11. coordinate phrases per T-unit (CP/T)
12. coordinate phrases per clause (CP/C)
13. complex nominals per T-unit (CN/T)
14. complex nominals per clause (CP/C)

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Contents

• NeoSCA vs. L2SCA ^{Top ▲}
• Installation ^{Top ▲}
• Usage ^{Top ▲}
• Citing ^{Top ▲}
• License ^{Top ▲}

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NeoSCA vs. L2SCA ^{Top ▲}

L2SCA	NeoSCA
runs on macOS and Linux	runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux
single and multiple input are handled respectively by two commands	one command, nsca, for both cases, making your life easier
runs only under its own home directory	runs under any directory
outputs only frequencies of the "9+14" syntactic structures	add options to reserve intermediate results, i.e., Stanford Parser's parsing results and Tregex's querying results

Installation ^{Top ▲}

1. Install neosca

pip install neosca

For uers inside of China:

pip install neosca -i https://pypi.tuna.tsinghua.edu.cn/simple

2. Install Java 8 or later

3. Download and unzip latest versions of Stanford Parser and Stanford Tregex

4. Set `STANFORD_PARSER_HOME` and `STANFORD_TREGEX_HOME`

• Windows:

In the Environment Variables window (press Windows+s, type env, and press Enter):

STANFORD_PARSER_HOME=\path\to\stanford-parser-full-2020-11-17
STANFORD_TREGEX_HOME=\path\to\stanford-tregex-2020-11-17

• Linux/macOS:

export STANFORD_PARSER_HOME=/path/to/stanford-parser-full-2020-11-17
export STANFORD_TREGEX_HOME=/path/to/stanford-tregex-2020-11-17

Usage ^{Top ▲}

The NeoSCA runs via the command nsca.

1. Single input:

nsca sample1.txt 
# output will be saved in result.csv
nsca sample1.txt -o sample1.csv 
# custom output file

2. Multiple input:

nsca sample1.txt sample2.txt
nsca sample*.txt 
# wildcard characters are supported
nsca sample[1-10].txt

3. Use -p/--reserve-parsed to reserve parsed files of Stanford Parser. Use -m/--reserve-match to reserve match results of Stanford Tregex.

nsca sample1.txt -p -m

4. Calling nsca without any arguments returns the help message.

Citing ^{Top ▲}

Please use the following citation if you use NeoSCA in your work:

@misc{tan2022neosca,
author = {Tan, Long},
title = {NeoSCA},
howpublished = {\url{https://github.com/tanloong/neosca}},
year = {2022}
}

Also, you need to cite Lu's article describing L2SCA:

@article{lu2010automatic,
title={Automatic analysis of syntactic complexity in second language writing},
author={Lu, Xiaofei},
journal={International journal of corpus linguistics},
volume={15},
number={4},
pages={474--496},
year={2010},
publisher={John Benjamins}
}

License ^{Top ▲}

The same as L2SCA, NeoSCA is licensed under the GNU General Public License, version 2 or later.