Comprehension and Analysis of Information in Text: I. Construction and Evaluation of Brief Texts

摘要

The purpose of this technical report is to describe a series of studies designed to construct and validate a set of text materials necessary to the pursuance of a long-term research project on information analysis and integration in semantically-rich, naturalistic domains. The necessity for materials construction arises from the capricious character of natural materials within the primary semantic domain of this project, namely, the stock market. We were able to select and modify from natural materials a large pool of sentences pertinent to the market behavior of stock issued by typical American companies. These studies generate a set of normative material useful for proposed studies of a more theoretical nature. The texts have important known properties. They have been propositionalized, and the total number of propositions per text and per category within text has been determined. Furthermore, we know how reliably individual sentences within texts can be categorized and rated and we have an index of the overall cohesion of each text.