Number of Words Versus Number Ideas: Finding a Better Predictor of Writing Quality
Jennifer L. Weston, Scott A. Crossley, Philip M. McCarthy, Danielle S. McNamara · The Florida AI Research Society · 2011
This study examines the relation between the linguistic features of freewrites and human assessments of freewriting quality. This study builds upon the authors’ previous studies in which a model was developed based on the linguistic features of freewrites written by 9 th and 11 th grade students to predict freewrite quality. The current study reexamines this model using number of propositions as a predictor instead of number of words because the number of propositions was expected to be a better proxy for number of ideas in contrast to simple text length. The results indicated that there were only slight advantages for using a measure for number of propositions, indicating that from an artificial intelligence perspective, the number of words was the better measure.