complexity checker – English Grammar Profiler

When we are talking about a sentence complexity checker, we are referring to the free English grammar profiler app you can use here to check how complex sentences are against CEFR scales.

Being able to analyze the complexity in a corpus is not an original thing.   Gupta, T., Srivastava, B., & Bauer, A. A Corpus Complexity Analyzer for NLP Applications Show that there are clearly many uses that are different.  Some need to simplify their writing to make it more easily understood for business reasons.

Yet for EnglishGrammar.Pro it is about L2 writing which has also been covered extensively in the literature.  For example, p.35 of

Kim, J. Y. (2014). Predicting L2 Writing Proficiency Using Linguistic Complexity Measures: A Corpus-Based Study. English Teaching, 69(4).

contains a long list of methods that their study uses.

TABLE 2 Linguistic Complexity Features Measured for the Current Study Type Measure (Code) Formula Text length Number of words (NW) # of words Number of sentences (NS) # of sentences Lexical Complexity Type 1: Lexical density Lexical density (LD) Nlex/ N Type 2: Lexical sophistication Lexical sophistication 1 (LS1) Nslex / Nlex Lexical sophistication 2 (LS2) Ts/T Verb sophistication 1 (VS1) Tsverb / Nverb Verb sophistication 2 (VS2) Tsverb / Corrected VS1 (CVS1) T2 sverb / Nverb Type 3: Lexical variation Number of different words (NDW) T Type/Token ratio (TTR) T/N Corrected TTR (CTTR) T/ Root TTR (RTTR) T/ Lexical word variation (LV) Tlex / Nlex Squared VV1 (SVV1) T2 verb / Nverb Corrected VV1 (CVV1) Tverb / Verb variation 1 (VV1) Tverb / Nverb Verb variation 2 (VV2) Tverb / Nlex Noun variation (NV) Tnoun / Nlex Adjective variation (AdjV) Tadj / Nlex Adverb variation (AdvV) Tadv / Nlex Modifier variation (ModV) (Tadj + Tadv)/ Nlex Syntactic Complexity Type 1. Length of production Mean length of sentences (MLS) # of words/# of sentences Mean length of T-unit (MLT) # of words/# of T-units Mean length of clause (MLC) # of words/# of clauses Type 2: Sentence complexity Clause per sentence (C/S) # of clauses# of sentences Type 3: Subordination Clause per T-unit (C/T) # of clauses/# of T-units Complex T-unit ratio (CT/T) # of complex T-unit/# of T-units Dependent clause per clause (DC/C) # of dependent clauses/# of clauses Dependent clause per T-unit (DC/T) # of dependent clauses/# of T-units Type 4: Coordination T-unit per sentence (T/S) # of T-units/# of sentences Coordinate phrase per clause (CP/C) # of coordinate phrases/# of clauses Coordinate phrase per T-unit (CP/T) # of coordinate phrases/# of T-units Type 5: Particular structures Complex nominal per T-unit (CN/T) # of complex nominals/# of T-units Complex nominal per clause (CN/C) # of complex nominals/# of clauses Verb phrase per T-unit (VP/T) # of verb phrases/#of T-units Notes. N = the number of words; Nlex = the number of lexical words; Nslex = the number of sophisticated lexical words; Nverb = the number of verbs; T = the number of word types; Tlex = the number of lexical word types; Ts = the number of sophisticated word types; Tsverb = the number of sophisticated verb types; # = number; / = divided by; T-unit: one main clause + any subordinate

clause

Yet the main difference between our EnglishGrammar.Pro complexity checker and the above is that they rely on word, clause etc. length.