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User Manual Taassc 1.1

TAASSC is a tool that analyzes syntactic complexity and sophistication in text. It calculates 372 indices across five categories and outputs results to a CSV file. To use TAASSC, the user selects the types of indices to analyze, inputs text files to a folder, runs the analysis, and saves the output. TAASSC is freely available online and requires Java to run properly.

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Thanawan Chakkhuchan
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234 views3 pages

User Manual Taassc 1.1

TAASSC is a tool that analyzes syntactic complexity and sophistication in text. It calculates 372 indices across five categories and outputs results to a CSV file. To use TAASSC, the user selects the types of indices to analyze, inputs text files to a folder, runs the analysis, and saves the output. TAASSC is freely available online and requires Java to run properly.

Uploaded by

Thanawan Chakkhuchan
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Tool for the Automatic Analysis of Syntactic Sophistication and Complexity

(TAASSC)

User Manual for TAASSC 1.1 (updated 4-26-2017)


Kristopher Kyle - University of Hawaii at Manoa
Scott Crossley - Georgia State University

This document is intended to assist users of TAASSC. It includes a brief explanation of how to
use the tool. Additional information about TAASSC is included in the supplementary Index
Description Spreadsheet (available at www.kristopherkyle.com).

Please use the following citation when referencing TAASSC in your work:

Kyle, K. (in press). Measuring syntactic development in L2 writing: Fine grained indices of
syntactic complexity and usage-based indices of syntactic sophistication. (Doctoral
dissertation).

If you use any of the SCA indices, please also use the following citation:

Lu, X. (2010). Automatic analysis of syntactic complexity in second language writing.


International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 15(4):474-496.

Getting Started

TAASSC is freely available at http://www.kristopherkyle.com/taassc.html. Download the


version that is appropriate for your operating system.

For TAASSC to work properly, you must also download and install the Java Development Kit
(JDK), which is freely available at:
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/jdk8-downloads-2133151.html.

Options

TAASSC analyzes a number of textual aspects related to syntactic complexity and


sophistication. The user can choose to include indices related to all of these aspects, or can
choose to constrain the output.

The user may choose to include indices from any (or all) of the following categories:
• clause complexity
• phrase complexity
• syntactic sophistication
• aggregated component scores related to clause complexity, phrase complexity, and
syntactic sophistication
• classic indices of syntactic complexity as measured by the L2 Syntactic Complexity
Analyzer (L2SCA) version 3.3.3
o Note that including SCA indices will significantly increase processing time.
Consider running other desired indices first, then running SCA indices separately.

The user may also choose to output files processed by TAASSC and SCA for follow-up analyses
(advanced). Output may include:
• text file databases, which include information pertaining to each clause and/or phrase in
your target texts in tab-delimited format
• parsed versions of each of your target texts in xml format
o TAASSC indices use "collapsed-ccprocessed-dependencies" in the xml files
included in the “mod_parsed” folder
o SCA indices use the parse trees in the xml files included in the “sca_parsed”
folder

Input

All input files must be text files (.txt) that do not include any type of markup (e.g., XML, HTML,
etc.). Files must be located in a single folder. TAASSC will process all .txt files in the chosen
input folder. Please note the following when formatting your files:
• Input text filenames should not include spaces, quotation marks, or commas
• For best results, your texts should be in sentence case (i.e., not all lower-case or upper
case).
• Any and all text in a file will be processed and factored into index scores. For accurate
results, make sure no unwanted headers are included in the input files.

Saving Your Output

TAASSC provides output in the form of a comma-separated (.csv) file that can be opened with
any spreadsheet software. The default output file name is “results.csv”, though we would
recommend changing this file name each time you run TAASSC to ensure that the file is not
overwritten. Syntactic components and SCA indices will be included in separate .csv files (i.e.,
“results_components.csv” and “results_sca.csv”).

Indices

TAASSC 1.0 calculates 372 indices in five categories: Clause complexity (32 indices), phrase
complexity (132 indices), syntactic sophistication (190 indices), syntactic component scores (9
indices), and classic syntactic complexity indices (14 indices). Please see the supplementary
spreadsheet file for more information. Also, see the dissertation referenced above for more
information.

Use of component scores


Note that the component scores are computed based on standardized scores. This means that if
one plans to compare data with regard to these scores, ALL data included in the analysis must be
processed by TAASSC at the same time. For example, if one were to compare high and low
quality essays, both the high and the low quality essays would need to be placed in the same
folder to be processed by TAASSC.
Visualization (Advanced)

Also included at www.kristopherkyle.com is a visualization tool for analyzing dependency


relations in TAASSC processed xml files (i.e., files included in the “mod_parsed” folder). This
visualization is implemented using brat and requires some programming knowledge to use. To
try it out, download the visualization folder from www.kristopherkyle.com and follow the
instructions in the readme file.

SCA output can be visualized using Tregex. One can enter the Tregex search patterns used by
SCA (e.g., clause, complex nominals, etc.), which are found in the Python script for SCA, to see
what is identified.

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