Syntactic Simplicity Research Articles

Does Simplification Occur at Sentence Level in the English Translations of Chinese Academic Works? –A Comparable Corpus Analysis of Syntactic Complexity

ABSTRACT Scholars of translation studies have hypothesized that translated texts tend to show simplification at lexical and syntactic levels compared to non-translated native texts. The present study examined simplification at the sentence level between translated and native English texts from the perspective of syntactic complexity. The research finds that the English translations of Chinese academic works tend to be simpler than their non-translated counterparts on 8 of 14 widely accepted indices of syntactic complexity. The study reveals that simplification at the sentence level exists and tends to occur at indices related to linguistic structures or units with more complex semantic or syntactic relationships. In contrast, complexification tends to occur at indices related to linguistic structures or units with less complex relationships. We suggest future research focus on investigating the extent, ways, and indices at which syntactic simplification occurs in translation, along with its effects and implications, rather than debating its existence.

A Contrastive Study of English Introductions of Chinese and British Museums in Move Distribution and Readability

Based on a designed move analysis model, we manually annotated 83 English introductions of Chinese museums (EICMs) and 127 English introductions of British museums (EIBMs), and used SPSS to do the significance test on the distribution of moves. The result shows that the moves of Identification, Location, History, Evaluation, Additional Museum Attractions, and Summary in EICMs occur significantly more frequently, while the moves of Highlight, Action Soliciting, and Support occur significantly less frequently. Besides, the study also investigated the readability of the introductions of the two groups of museums. The result shows that EICMs’ overall readability is significantly lower, especially in Narrativity, Syntactic Simplicity, and Deep Cohesion.Those results show that EICMs are more of informational text, while EIBMs are more of promotional text. Choices of narrative person, substance and function words, and use of causal and intentional particles may lead to the difference in readability. Contemporary museums have long since moved on from the stage where objects were left to “speak for themselves”. Museum introductions’ content selection and language expression should be targeted at their readers. The findings are expected to provide a reference for the writing and translation of museum introductions, and attract more visitors to Chinese museums.

Detecting Financial Statement Fraud through Multidimensional Analysis of Text Readability

ABSTRACT This study uses Coh-Metrix to analyze multiple dimensions of readability of the MD&A section of the SEC Form 10-K. We incorporate the five main Coh-Metrix components of text easability (word concreteness, syntactic simplicity, referential cohesion, deep cohesion, and narrativity) into a logistic model to test their predictive power for financial misreporting. We find that compared to the MD&As of nonfraud firms, the MD&As of fraud firms connect clauses and sentences less coherently, use more story-like language, and show a higher number of vague and abstract words. Thus, referential cohesion, narrativity, and word concreteness significantly enhance predictive ability in fraud detection. The Coh-Metrix readability measures enhance the linguistic complexity assessment beyond traditional readability measures, such as the Fog Index and the Flesch Indexes. Financial analysts and investors can utilize the Coh-Metrix readability measures to supplement traditional readability measures and common financial statement variables in predicting financial misreporting. Data Availability: Data are available from the public sources cited in the text. JEL Classifications: G32; K42; M41; M48.

Syntactic simplification in interpreted English: Dependency distance and direction measures

This study investigates the simplification hypothesis in interpreting, as well as its cognitive implications, by examining features of syntactic dependency in three language varieties: English speech simultaneously interpreted from Chinese, original English speech produced by native speakers (L1 speech), and original English speech produced by non-native speakers (L2 speech). Two measures of the dependency relation, namely dependency distance and dependency direction, are employed to explore the distinction among the three language varieties in terms of their syntactic complexity, amount of cognitive demand, and the typological property of word order. The findings reveal that interpreted speech has the lowest mean dependency distance (MDD), followed by L2 speech and L1 speech, which indicates that interpreted English speech is syntactically more simplified than original English speech. The lowest MDD in interpreted speech is associated with the high cognitive demand in simultaneous interpreting, suggesting that increased cognitive demand in language processing is likely to lead to simplification of the syntactic structure of the linguistic output. Furthermore, dependency direction analysis of the three language varieties indicates that interpreted English tends to be more head-final than L1 English speech, confirming a typological word order distinction between translational and original language.

Chinese intermediate English learners outdid ChatGPT in deep cohesion: Evidence from English narrative writing

ChatGPT is a publicly available chatbot that can quickly generate texts on given topics, but it remains unknown whether the chatbot is as good as or even superior to human writers in all aspects of writing, and whether the chatbot's writing quality can be significantly improved by updating commands. To investigate these issues, this study compared writing performance on a narrative topic by ChatGPT and Chinese intermediate English (CIE) learners so as to reveal the chatbot's advantages and disadvantages in writing.The data were analyzed by virtue of the five discourse components using Coh-Metrix (a special instrument for analyzing language discourse), and the results revealed that ChatGPT performed better than human writers in narrativity, word concreteness, and referential cohesion, but worse in syntactic simplicity and deep cohesion in its initial version. After its commands were updated, the resulting version was better in its syntactic simplicity, but it still lagged far behind the CIE learners’ writing in deep cohesion. In addition, a correlation analysis of the discourse components suggests that narrativity was correlated with referential cohesion for both ChatGPT and the human writers, but the correlations varied within each group.

Defying syntactic preservation in Alzheimer's disease: what type of impairment predicts syntactic change in dementia (if it does) and why?

IntroductionMany studies on syntax in dementia suggest that, despite syntactic simplification, speakers with Alzheimer's disease (AD) retain their basic grammatical abilities, being mainly affected in their comprehension and production of complex syntax. Moreover, there is no single position on the origin of syntactic decline in AD, which, according to some authors, can be linked to a lexical-semantic deficit or, according to others, to either cognitive or autonomous dysfunction.MethodsIn this study, we apply the model of syntactic maturity to the analysis of oral speech production elicited by the Cookie-Theft description task. We assess a sample of 60 older adults (21 HC, 19 MCI, and 20 AD) through three indexes of syntactic maturity, measuring the proportion of sentences and clauses in discourse, their mean length, and the rate of their complexity.ResultsOur results show two important tendencies in AD: the preservation of general syntactic ability, as measured by the basic syntactic organization of speech, and the disturbance of the indexes of syntactic complexity, as measured by the overall length of utterances and their indexes of complexity.DiscussionAlthough speakers with AD maintain the ability to construct grammatically acceptable sentences and produce a similar number of utterances to healthy aging speakers and speakers with MCI, the syntactic complexity of their discourse significantly changes. Importantly, such significant changes are already present at the MCI stage and are not conditioned by the lexical-semantic deficit itself. Our results may be particularly relevant to improving the detection of cognitive impairment and to theoretically discussing the relationships between language levels in aging speakers.

Pashto Radical Simple Verbs and the Linguistic Border

Abstract This article intends to focus on the concept of linguistic border in the verbal system of contemporary Pashto, an Iranian language mainly spoken in Afghanistan and Pakistan. A careful, systematic, and detailed analysis of used radical simple verbs in different Pashto dialects draws attention to a certain degree of variation in one third of these verbs, which are switching from one category to another. Thanks to our research on Pashto verbs, we could identify four main trends of change, displaying as morphologic regularization, syntactic simplification, morphologic differentiation, and semantic clarification.

VANITY FAIRIN RUSSIAN: TO THE 175 TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE FIRST PUBLICATION

The article examines four Russian translations of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair: the early translation by Irinarkh Vvedenskii; the translations made by V. Stein and L. Gay at the turn of the century, and the translation by Mikhail Dyakonov published in 1933-1934. The latter, canonical for Russian culture, was published with a commentary by Gustav Speth in the Academiapublishing house. Different translation strategies are discussed: first, Vvedenskii’s strategy of coauthorship with the translated author, which is sometimes at odds with the intonation of the original. Secondly, Shtein’s and Gay’s aspiration to translate an acknowledged classic ‘word for word’, resulting in obscure expressions and syntactic structures. And finally, Dyakonov’s foreignizing, philologically accurate approach. As can be seen on the material of Dyakonov’s letters to the proofreaders of Academia, syntactically and phonetically foreignizing translation is his conscious strategy. It is noted that the corrections made by the editors M. Lorie and R. Galperina in 1953 and 1968 are mostly insignificant: they incorporate stylistic equivalents, strive for syntactic simplicity and remove ambiguity of certain expressions; besides, Lorie translates charactonyms in a later edition. The article also focuses on Shpet’s scholarly commentary, which has not been republished since his arrest in 1937. Unlike footnotes in later editions, Speth’s commentary primarily clarifies the function of a particular detail. The analysis demonstrates that Dyakonov’s translation method and Speth’s approach to the commentary require intellectual effort from the reader and are aimed at a deep understanding of English culture.

La tendencia hacia la simplificación en el discurso especializado y no-especializado: ampliando el alcance de los estudios de traducción basados en corpus al análisis multidiscursivo

This paper intends to contribute to research on the simplification hypothesis by incorporating a multi-discourse analysis. The study compares non-specialized and academic specialized discourse with the aim of describing their similarities and difference in terms of syntactic and stylistic simplification. Considering two variables (non-specialized/specialized discourse and original/translated texts) allows for examination of which has a greater influence on the tendency towards simplification. According to the adopted corpus-based methodology, four corpora are compiled, including original and translated English texts representing non-specialized and academic discourse. Then, simplification-related features (lexical variety, lexical density, mean sentence length, use of subordination and non-finite sentences) are determined and identified in each corpus. The comparison of the results across different corpora shows signs of simplification in both types of discourse. However, each presents different linguistic features, suggesting that simplification is more related to the type of discourse than to the original or translated nature of the analyzed texts.

Do similar contexts of production entail similar textual features? A corpus-based comparison of the simplification-related features in translation and Academic Writing

This paper explores the relationship between the context of production of texts and their specific features. With this aim, the study compares the features related to syntactic and stylistic simplification between two textual practices: translation and Academic Writing. Actually, both practices are produced in common contexts with similar purposes. Further, the exam of simplification-related features in different sets of texts translated into English from different languages also allow for further verifying the translation universals hypothesis of simplification. For the analysis, an archive of four comparable corpora of English texts is compiled, representing original and translated versions of academic and non-academic texts, respectively. Once determined concrete indicators of simplification (lexical variety, lexical density, mean sentence length, presence of subordination and of non-finite sentences), a corpus-based methodology is used to identify each one of them in each set of texts, according to the hypothesis that both practices present the same simplification-related features at the same extent. The comparison of the results refutes both hypotheses, showing that each practice presents different simplification-related features and, in all the analyzed corpora, originals result to be simpler than translations. Moreover, the distribution of the examined indicators across the four corpora seems to follow a regular pattern suggesting an interesting point of departure for further studies.

A comparative study on lexical and syntactic features of ESL versus EFL learners' writing.

This study analyzes the compositions of Hong Kong English as a second language (ESL) learners and English as a foreign language (EFL) learners in Mainland China in terms of lexical and syntactic features. A program based on the CoreNLP was developed and used to analyze written language texts, and differences in tags of parts of speech and syntactic dependencies between the two groups of texts were compared statistically to examine differences in the lexical and syntactic features of the learners' written language. The results show significant differences in the lexical and syntactic features of learners' writing. Specifically, in EFL learners' writing, there is a salient group pattern of higher lexical diversity, whereas ESL compositions are more flexible in vocabulary use with higher information density, in that they use more syntactic phrases and content words. In terms of syntax, Hong Kong ESL students use more adverbials and adverbial clauses, which is advantageous in syntactic simplicity and readability over their counterparts, whereas Mainland China EFL students prefer using more specific expressions to demonstrate syntactic relations. Compared to EFL compositions, ESL compositions are more informative, coherent, and grammatical in lexical features and more readable in syntactic features, which require more attention and further improvements in terms of EFL teaching.

VoteSumm: A Multi-Document Summarization Scheme Using Influential Nodes of Multilayer Weighted Sentence Network

This work proposes a sentence network-based approach for performing the task of multi-document text summarization. The sentences of the input set of documents are represented by the nodes of the network. Weighted edges are added between the nodes to represent the semantic similarity between the corresponding sentences. The network has a multilayer structure, where each layer corresponds to an individual input document. This helps in effective differentiation between the inter-document and intra-document edges. A hyperparameter, namely layering factor, has been used to alter the strength of inter-document connections through reinforcement or weakening. It is hypothesized that the summary sentence nodes must act as effective information spreaders in the sentence network. Summary generation is performed by identifying the influential nodes of the network using VoteRank scheme. A comparative study with different network measures, such as Weighted Degree, PageRank, Betweenness centrality, and Closeness centrality reveals the efficacy of the proposed VoteSumm technique for multi-document text summarization. Improved performance is observed when an additional pre-processing step of syntactic simplification is applied on the raw text. Performance is further improved when keyword information is included in the simplified texts.

The Relationship between Text Formality and Writing Quality: An Evaluation Based on Coh-Metrix

This study seeks to investigate the relationship between text formality and writing quality by quantifying text formality in EFL English writing. In order to conduct the research, 548 English argumentation compositions were evaluated in terms of the five Coh-Metrix text formality dimensions: narrativity, syntactic simplicity, word concreteness, referential coherence, and deep cohesion. Based on the study, there is only a weak relationship between text formality and writing quality, and some facets of text formality, such as narrativity, word concreteness, syntactic simplicity, and deep cohesion, have varying degrees of influence on writing quality and, consequently, on English writing scores. As per statistics, narrativity has a detrimental effect on writing quality; word concreteness has a significant positive correlation with writing quality; syntactic simplicity shows a relatively small negative correlation with writing quality; deep cohesion has a modestly negative correlation with writing quality; and referential coherence has no correlation with writing quality. It is intended that the findings of this study will have some bearing on how English argumentative writing is taught and learned.

The Relationship between Text Formality and Writing Quality: An Evaluation Based on Coh-Metrix

This study seeks to investigate the relationship between text formality and writing quality by quantifying text formality in EFL English writing. In order to conduct the research, 548 English argumentation compositions were evaluated in terms of the five Coh-Metrix text formality dimensions: narrativity, syntactic simplicity, word concreteness, referential coherence, and deep cohesion. Based on the study, there is only a weak relationship between text formality and writing quality, and some facets of text formality, such as narrativity, word concreteness, syntactic simplicity, and deep cohesion, have varying degrees of influence on writing quality and, consequently, on English writing scores. As per statistics, narrativity has a detrimental effect on writing quality; word concreteness has a significant positive correlation with writing quality; syntactic simplicity shows a relatively small negative correlation with writing quality; deep cohesion has a modestly negative correlation with writing quality; and referential coherence has no correlation with writing quality. It is intended that the findings of this study will have some bearing on how English argumentative writing is taught and learned.

Studying the Effect of Syntactic Simplification on Text Summarization

The need for automatic text summarization (ATS) is increased manifold in recent times due to the overwhelming growth of textual data available in electronic form. However, existing ATS systems suffer from two major shortcomings. Summarizers of extractive type, that is, the ones which select important sentences of the documents in their original form as the output, tend to copy some irrelevant or unimportant parts of the input text in the output summary. On the other hand, abstractive summarizers, that is, the ones that produce a gist of the limited size of the original document, often fail to include important contents in the generated summary. Simplification of the input texts before submitting them to the ATS system(s) may obliterate the above difficulties. The present work examines the effectiveness of simplification of input for five different known ATS systems. In this work, DEPSYM++ simplifier has been used for the above purpose, which carries out four different kinds of simplification on sentences of the input text corresponding to the presence of appositive clause, relative clause, conjoint clause, and passive voice. The results obtained are found to be very encouraging when experiments were carried out on three different gold data sets and under different evaluation metrics commonly used for performance evaluation for summarizers.

The Impact of Lexical and Syntactic Simplification of Materials on Listening Comprehension of Intermediate EFL Learners

The Impact of Lexical and Syntactic Simplification of Materials on Listening Comprehension of Intermediate EFL Learners

Pattern-Based Syntactic Simplification of Compound and Complex Sentences

With the advent of new technologies, simplifying the text automatically has been very popular and of high importance among natural language researchers during the last decade. The predominant research done in the area of Automatic Sentence Simplification(ASS) is inclined to either lexical or syntactical simplification of sentences. From the literature survey, it is observed that existing research in lexical simplification makes use of word substitution technique. This causes word sense ambiguity in cases where the word synonyms are not appropriate for a sentence in the given context. In contrast syntactical simplification though is accurate and applicable to Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks requires tremendous efforts to construct rules for a given domain. The research proposes a framework called, Pattern-based Automatic Syntactic Simplification(PASS) which identifies sentences and applies rules based on grammatical patterns to simplify the sentences thereby making it more generic for NLP tasks. PASS is evaluated by human experts to rate the usefulness of the framework based on fluency, adequacy and simplicity of the sentences. Furthermore, the framework is automatically evaluated with the available online corpus using automatic metrics of SARI, BLEU, and FKGL. The proposed approach generates promising results in the field of ASS and could be used as a preliminary module for NLP tasks as well as other natural language-related applications like summarization, anaphora resolution, question-answering, and many more.

Human Ratings of Writing Quality Capture Features of Syntactic Variety and Transformation in Chinese EFL Learners' Argumentative Writing.

Traditionally, writing quality is measured by human ratings, either holistically or analytically. The present study aimed to investigate the locus of human ratings by analyzing the linguistic features that are predictive of writing quality. One hundred and 44 argumentative writing samples from Chinese learners of English as a foreign language were evaluated by human ratings and quantitative measurement of writing quality indexed by Coh-Metrix. Holistic and analytic human ratings had significant correlations with quantitative measures related to syntactic variety and transformation. Moreover, linear and logistic regressions revealed that syntactic simplicity, words before main verb, syntactic structure similarity in all sentences and across paragraphs, incidence of passive voice and temporal connectives were five valid indices that can consistently differentiate writing quality indexed by human ratings. The present findings have significant pedagogical implications for human ratings on writing quality in the foreign language learning context.

Converting the Words of God: An experimental evaluation of stylistic choices in the new Dutch Bible translation

In an experiment stylistic choices in the new Dutch Bible translation were evaluated. 185 participants evaluated 4 fragments which differed in type of variation (lexical or syntactic), source of the fragment (Bible - classical text) and the way the variations were applied (single - mixed). Also the religious¬ness of the evaluator was taken into account. Examined is whether lexical modernization and syntactic simplification are evaluated the same, whether single variations show a better insight into the evaluations and if the evaluation is influenced by the source of the text or the religiousness of the evaluator. The results showed that there is a difference in evaluation between syntactic and lexical variation, that single variation gives better insight into the evaluations and that source of the text and religiousness do not influence the evaluations. This study demonstrates that translators must involve readers at an early stage in their discussions on a required or appropriate register.

What Makes Reading Difficult? An Investigation of the Contributions of Passage, Task, and Reader Characteristics on Comprehension Performance

ABSTRACTIn this study, I investigated the simultaneous effects of the reader, the text, and the task factors, and their interactions, on reading comprehension, using explanatory item response models. Analyses of a large data set from a commercially available online assessment system with a wide range of readers (n = 10,547) and passages (n = 48) uncovered factors that contribute to reading challenge in complex ways. Among the passage features, sentence length, word frequency, syntactic simplicity, and temporality were found to significantly affect comprehension difficulty. More importantly, these textual features were moderated by student general vocabulary and task type. In general, high‐vocabulary readers benefited more from traditional textual affordances (e.g., shorter sentences, familiar words, simpler grammatical constructions) than low‐vocabulary readers, especially when asked to recall localized information without accessing the passage. However, a reverse effect was found with temporality: Passages with more time markers helped low‐vocabulary readers, whereas low‐temporality passages helped high‐vocabulary readers. Ultimately, understanding these complex interactions, as highlighted in the RAND Reading Study Group’s heuristic model, will be key in supporting students with their comprehension development.