Measuring complexity 1. Introduction
Measuring syntactic/grammatical complexity
In corpus-based research, syntactic and grammatical complexity can be measured by identifying and quantifying linguistic structures of interest. With small datasets, these features can be annotated manually. For larger datasets, automated tools can make annotation and feature extraction much more efficient. (Note that automated annotation is not a fully automatic process. Researchers should understand what a tool identifies, inspect its output carefully, and ensure that the annotations are transparent and interpretable.)
The goal of this tutorial is to provide hands-on practice with two Python-based tools for analyzing syntactic and grammatical complexity. You will learn how to run the tools on corpus data and examine their annotations and outputs.