Abstract
The article focuses on the practical field of the development and implementation of a software application developed for the automatic processing of eight metrics to calculate the lexical complexity in a corpus that contains the transcriptions of university educational videos in Spanish called VYTEDU, prepared by teachers from the University of Guayaquil, Ecuador. The obtained result allowed to demonstrate the different indexes of lexical complexity that the texts have in terms of the comprehensibility of their content. One of the main characteristics of the texts lies in the difference in size and content. It should be noted that although some texts had greater content, the index of lexical complexity was lower than other texts whose content was smaller in size. The diffusion of the software supposes the use of it as a tool to continue researching in the field of Natural Language Processing. The application developed using free software tools facilitated the use of libraries in the field of Natural Language Processing contributing to the analysis of the complexity of text comprehension, making this research a second step to build an automatic simplification tool for text in Spanish in the higher academic field that is proposed as future work, since the first step was the construction of the VYTEDU corpus together with its publication.
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Notes
- 1.
Lexicon – According to the dictionary of the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language, its meaning is the “set of words of a language, or those that belong to the use of a region”. Official website available at http://dle.rae.es/?id=ND3Rym3.
- 2.
CEATIC: Center for Advanced Studies of the University of Jaén (Jaén-España). (by its initials in Spanish).
- 3.
VYTEDU: Videos and Transcripts in the Educational field. (by its initials in Spanish).
- 4.
UTF-8: (8-bit Unicode Transformation Format). According to Yergeau (2003) “it is a transformation format of ISO 10646”.
- 5.
POS-tagger – Part-Of-Speech tagger, also known as POS Tagging, Mesa (2016).
- 6.
TAGGER of Stanford University, available at https://nlp.stanford.edu/software/stanford-postagger-full-2017-06-09.zip.
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Acknowledgments
Our gratitude to the contribution that PhD Alfonso Ureña, director of the PhD program in Information and Communication Technologies of the UJA (University of Jaén) and PhD Arturo Montejo - Director of this research project gave us, and also our thanks to MSc. Rocío Anguita from the University of Granada for her contribution in the development and statistical application of this material.
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Ortiz Zambrano, J., Varela Tapia, E. (2019). Reading Comprehension in University Texts: The Metrics of Lexical Complexity in Corpus Analysis in Spanish. In: Botto-Tobar, M., Barzola-Monteses, J., Santos-Baquerizo, E., Espinoza-Andaluz, M., Yánez-Pazmiño, W. (eds) Computer and Communication Engineering. ICCCE 2018. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 959. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-12018-4_9
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