Using Coh-Metrix Temporal Indices to Predict Psychological Measures of Time
Nicholas D. Duran, Arthur C. Graesser, Philip M. McCarthy, Danielle S. McNamara · eScholarship (California Digital Library) · 2006
Situation model theories of text comprehension consider temporality to be one of the critical dimensions for building a coherent mental representation of described events.Using this framework, three continuous scale measures were developed to assess temporal coherence based on tense, aspect, and adverbial relations.Experts in discourse processing evaluated 150 texts, excerpted from science, history, and literature textbooks, to establish a gold standard of temporality.We then demonstrated that Coh-Metrix, a computational tool that measures textual cohesion on over 200 indices of discourse features, could significantly reflect these human interpretations by incorporating five indices of local, temporal cohesion.We conclude our paper with a discussion of our current research into developments of more sophisticated global temporal indices.