Crossley Scott A, Kyle Kristopher, McNamara Danielle S
Department of Linguistics, Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA, USA.
Learning Sciences Institute/Psychology, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA.
Behav Res Methods. 2016 Dec;48(4):1227-1237. doi: 10.3758/s13428-015-0651-7.
This study introduces the Tool for the Automatic Analysis of Cohesion (TAACO), a freely available text analysis tool that is easy to use, works on most operating systems (Windows, Mac, and Linux), is housed on a user's hard drive (rather than having an Internet interface), allows for the batch processing of text files, and incorporates over 150 classic and recently developed indices related to text cohesion. The study validates TAACO by investigating how its indices related to local, global, and overall text cohesion can predict expert judgments of text coherence and essay quality. The findings of this study provide predictive validation of TAACO and support the notion that expert judgments of text coherence and quality are either negatively correlated or not predicted by local and overall text cohesion indices, but are positively predicted by global indices of cohesion. Combined, these findings provide supporting evidence that coherence for expert raters is a property of global cohesion and not of local cohesion, and that expert ratings of text quality are positively related to global cohesion.
本研究介绍了连贯自动分析工具（TAACO），这是一款免费的文本分析工具，易于使用，适用于大多数操作系统（Windows、Mac和Linux），安装在用户硬盘上（而非具有网络接口），允许对文本文件进行批量处理，并纳入了150多个与文本连贯相关的经典和最新开发的指标。该研究通过调查TAACO与局部、全局和整体文本连贯相关的指标如何预测文本连贯性和文章质量的专家判断，来验证TAACO。本研究的结果为TAACO提供了预测性验证，并支持这样一种观点，即文本连贯性和质量的专家判断与局部和整体文本连贯指标呈负相关或无法由其预测，但与连贯的全局指标呈正相关。综合来看，这些结果提供了支持性证据，表明对于专家评分者而言，连贯性是全局连贯的属性而非局部连贯的属性，并且文本质量的专家评分与全局连贯呈正相关。
