To do this, we collected a corpus of persuasive essays written by college freshmen. We examine the degree to which the linguistic features of essays related to cohesion predict expert judgments of text organization (i.e., our measure of text coherence) and writing quality. In this study, we demonstrate the utility of the cohesion indices provided by TAACO, with a focus on the domain of writing, specifically on persuasive essays. Local cohesion refers to cohesion at the sentence level (i.e., cohesion between smaller chunks of text such as noun overlap between sentences or linking sentences through connectives) global cohesion refers to cohesion between larger chunks of text such as paragraphs (e.g., noun overlap between paragraphs in a text) and overall text cohesion refers to the incidence of cohesion features in an entire text, but not in comparisons of parts of the text (e.g., lexical diversity, which is calculated as the repetition of words across a text). The cohesion indices reported by TAACO evenly focus on local cohesion, global cohesion, and overall text cohesion. TAACO is 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. This article introduces a new text cohesion analysis tool called the Tool for the Automatic Analysis of Cohesion (TAACO). Second, the Coh-Metrix cohesion indices generally focus solely on local and overall text cohesion (in contrast to global cohesion), and the publicly available tool includes a limited number of cohesion indices (25, at the time of writing).

First, the version made available to the public does not allow for the batch processing of text and is not housed on a user’s hard drive (and thus it is dependent on an Internet connection and an external server). Although Coh-Metrix has been extremely useful and has had a large impact on our understanding of language and discourse, it has several shortcomings with regard to usability and to the facile and broad measurements of its cohesion indices. The best-known example is likely Coh-Metrix (McNamara, Graesser, McCarthy, & Cai, 2014), an online tool that measures a number of linguistic features related to lexical sophistication, syntactic complexity, and cohesion. However, freely available natural language processing (NLP) tools that measure linguistic features related to text cohesion are limited. Hence, measuring cohesion is an important element of discourse-processing research (McNamara et al. 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.Ĭohesion is a crucial element for understanding texts, particularly with challenging texts that present knowledge demands to the reader (Loxterman, Beck, & McKeown, 1994 McNamara & Kintsch, 1996 McNamara, Kintsch, Songer, & Kintsch, 1996). 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. 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.

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.

Coherence meaning for nlp