On difficulty in handling text recycling

Text recycling: acceptable or misconduct?

Text recycling, also referred to as self-plagiarism, is the reproduction of an author's own text from a previous publication in a new publication. Opinions on the acceptability of this practice vary, with some viewing it as acceptable and efficient, and others as misleading and unacceptable. In light of the lack of consensus, journal editors often have difficulty deciding how to act upon the di...

Spoken Text Difficulty Estimation Using Linguistic Features

We present an automated method for estimating the difficulty of spoken texts for use in generating items that assess non-native learners’ listening proficiency. We collected information on the perceived difficulty of listening to various English monologue speech samples using a Likert-scale questionnaire distributed to 15 non-native English learners. We averaged the overall rating provided by t...

Text difficulty and the Arens-Altmann law

The study of text difficulty is considered to be an important issue for many branches of applied research. In the fields of journalism or education, for example, it is particularly important to know if (or to what degree) a given text is likely to cause difficulties for a recipient, or a group of recipients, i.e., if it is likely to be on an adequate (intended) level of difficulty or beyond. In...

Characterizing Text Difficulty with Word Frequencies

Natural language processing (NLP) methodologies have been widely adopted for readability assessment and greatly enhanced predictive accuracy. In the present study, we study a well-established feature, the frequency of a word in common language use, and systematically explore how such a word-level feature is best used to characterize the reading levels of texts, a text-level classification probl...

Handling Proximity for Text Problems