PAST - A text analysis tool 'to discover' Distinctions

摘要

In the course of Cybernetics of Cybernetics (CC), arises the problem of analyzing, for each student, three written texts from different moments during the course, searching for the distinctions, and their evolution throughout the course. PAST is a text analysis tool to help the professor in this "distinction discovering" in an impersonal and repeatable way. The process, based on professor-defined rules, consist in realizing successive text transformations that lead to a Conceptual Proximity Graph (CPG) reflecting the distinctions used in the text. This work describes the problem, the solution proposed by PAST, and its effectiveness by means of some simple examples and analyzing its use in the course of Cybernetics of Cybernetics.