The question of identity in a narrative text is one of the most influential questions that need further study. The variations in the factors that may affect the concept of identity add to the complexity of the narrative text. The study aims at analyzing the main phases, stages, themes and events of Moses’ life story as part of the narrative discourse. The effects of time and place on the main e...

Boredom and disengagement have been found to negatively impact learning. Therefore, it is important for learning environments to be able to track when students disengage from a learning task. We investigated a method to track engagement during self-paced reading by analyzing reading times. We propose that a breakdown in the relationship between reading time and text complexity can reveal diseng...

This paper investigates the influence of discourse features on text complexity assessment. To do so, we created two data sets based on the Penn Discourse Treebank and the Simple English Wikipedia corpora and compared the influence of coherence, cohesion, surface, lexical and syntactic features to assess text complexity. Results show that with both data sets coherence features are more correlate...

Deciding on the complexity of a generated text in NLG systems is a contentious task. Some systems propose the generation of simple text for low-skilled readers; some choose what they anticipate to be a “good measure” of complexity by balancing sentence length and number of sentences (using scales such as the D-level sentence complexity) for the text; while others target high-skilled readers. In...

Engagement during reading can be measured by the amount of time readers invest in the reading process. It is hypothesized that disengagement is marked by a decrease in time investment as compared with the demands made on the reader by the text. In this study, self-paced reading times for screens of text were predicted by a text complexity score called formality; formality scores increase with c...

Engagement during reading can be measured by the amount of time readers invest in the reading process. It is hypothesized that disengagement is marked by a decrease in time investment as compared with the demands made on the reader by the text. In this study, self-paced reading times for screens of text were predicted by a text complexity score called formality; formality scores increase with c...

This paper describes our research on automatically scoring students’ summaries for comprehension using not only text specific quantitative and qualitative features, but also more complex features based on the computational indices of cohesion available via Coh-Metrix and on Information Content (IC, a measure of text informativeness). We assessed whether human rated summary scores could be predi...