Abstract
Manually analysing and evaluating writing can be a time consuming, difficult, subjective and sometimes error-prone task. Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) provides a new technique for performing a variety of useful semantic analyses. LSA serves both as an approximate psychological theory of aspects of human word and passage meaning and as a practical tool for research and applications. It can evaluate the conceptual content of writing, including, the kind, quality and quantity of semantic information expressed and the conceptual coherence of arguments presented. In this chapter we provide an overview of LSA and then discuss four techniques for performing automatic analysis of the content of written information using LSA, both from the standpoint of teaching expository writing and from the standpoint of its analysis.
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The actual computation is somewhat more complex, weighting words by their communicative importance. See Deerwester et al. (1990) for technical details.
The population of random stories that would be required to establish chance variability is impossible to define quantitatively, so these values are only rough descriptions.
3 We thank Touchtone Applied Science, who developed this corpus as the basis of their Educator’s Word Frequency Guide, for sharing it with us at considerable effort.
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© 2002 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Foltz, P.W., Landauer, T.K. (2002). Potential Applications of Latent Semantic Analysis to Writing Analysis. In: Olive, T., Levy, C.M. (eds) Contemporary Tools and Techniques for Studying Writing. Studies in Writing, vol 10. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-0468-8_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-0468-8_8
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-1-4020-0106-2
Online ISBN: 978-94-010-0468-8
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