AUTOMATED SCORING OF INTEGRATIVE COMPLEXITY USING MACHINE LEARNING AND NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING by AARDRA

Conceptual/Integrative complexity is a construct developed in political psychology and clinical psychology to measure an individual’s ability to consider different perspectives on a particular issue and reach a justifiable conclusion after consideration of said perspectives. Integrative complexity (IC) is usually determined from text through manual scoring, which is timeconsuming, laborious and expensive. Consequently, there is a demand for automating the scoring, which could significantly reduce the time, expense and cognitive resources spent in the process. Any algorithm that could achieve the above with a reasonable accuracy could assist in the development of intervention systems for reducing the potential for aggression, systems for recruitment processes and even training personnel for improving group complexity in the corporate world. The proposed approach produced classification accuracies ranging from 75% to 83%, which is a first in the literature for automated scoring of integrative complexity. INDEX WORDS: integrative complexity, text classification, semantic similarity, support vector machines AUTOMATED SCORING OF INTEGRATIVE COMPLEXITY USING MACHINE LEARNING AND NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING