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Applying Information-theoretic Notions to Measure Effects of the Plain English Movement on English Law Reports and Scientific Articles

Summary

The authors test whether the Plain English Movement (PEM), which called for clearer legal language, actually made British court reports simpler from the 1950s to the 2010s. As a point of comparison, they use scientific articles, which were barely affected by PEM. The court judgments come from the CoCELD corpus, and the scientific texts come from a subcorpus of the Royal Society Corpus (RSC 6.0) covering 1950–1996. Both corpora are tagged with TreeTagger using the Penn Treebank tagset. Text complexity is measured by sentence length, the Dale-Chall formula and surprisal, an information-theoretic measure associated with the reader's cognitive effort. Surprisal is computed with a trigram model trained on a reference corpus from the same decade, with the analysed text itself excluded. Separately, the authors look for lexico-grammatical features typical of each period and compare them with PEM's recommendations. The movement turned out to have had almost no effect on either domain: the nominal style only grew stronger, and compound nouns occur more often and carry more information. The authors recommend that language simplification initiatives and automatic text simplification systems take processing effort into account, not only classic readability indices.

Key points

  • Data: CoCELD contains about 100k tokens and 40 texts per decade (48 texts in the 2010s). The RSC subcorpus has between 24 and 44 million tokens per decade, and 40 texts per decade were randomly sampled for the complexity comparison.
  • The authors test two hypotheses: whether complexity decreased (H1) and whether the style shifted from nominal to verbal (H2). Neither was confirmed. Compound nominal constructions became more frequent, and their surprisal is higher than that of simple noun phrases.
  • The rate of the passive fell: in court reports from 2.923 to 2.611 per million words, and in scientific articles from 17.574 to 12.720. However, general English shows the same decline in the LOB and FLOB corpora, so this is most likely a language-wide trend rather than an effect of PEM.
  • The word shall is most typical of the 1950s, but it mostly appears in direct quotations from other legal documents: 82% and 88% of occurrences in the samples from the 1950s and 2010s. PEM's influence here is therefore only indirect.
  • The Flesch Reading Ease and Gunning Fog formulas underestimated the complexity of court texts, so they were not used. KLD was applied to identify features typical of a given period.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Fields: Linguistics & languages

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.18653/v1/2024.latechclfl-1.11

@inproceedings{bagdasarov2024applying,
  title = {{Applying Information-theoretic Notions to Measure Effects of the Plain English Movement on English Law Reports and Scientific Articles}},
  author = {Bagdasarov, Sergei and Degaetano-Ortlieb, Stefania},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 8th Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature (LaTeCH-CLfL 2024)},
  year = {2024},
  doi = {10.18653/v1/2024.latechclfl-1.11},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2024.latechclfl-1.11}
}

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