Coherence-Building in Multiple Document Comprehension (original) (raw)
Related papers
Text Coherence and Judgments of Essay Quality: Models of Quality and Coherence
This study investigates the importance of human evaluations of coherence in predicting human judgments of holistic essay quality. Of secondary interest is the potential for computational indices of cohesion and coherence to model human judgments of coherence. The results indicate that human judgments of coherence are the most predictive features of holistic essay scores and that computational indices related to text structure, semantic coherence, lexical sophistication, and grammatical complexity best explain human judgments of text coherence. These findings have important implications for understanding the role of coherence in writing quality.
The Cohesion Concept's Relationship to the Coherence of Text. Technical Report No. 221
1981
concept of cohesion, a study examined statistical accounting of cohesive ties as a means of measuring and evaluating text coherence. Twelve grade twelve students were provided outlines on two topics and asked to write essays for each topic. One group of six students was familiar with the topics, the other group of.six students unfamiliar. Cohesive patterning was determined, based on a cohesive analysis of each text. A MANOVA revealed the effect of topic on cohesive patterning but showed no effect of familiarity on cohesion. When the essays were ranked according to their level of coherence and compared to the ordering of texts according to the cohesive analysis, no relation appeared between coherence ranking and cohesive patterning. Additional analyses of types of cohesive ties showed no significant relation between specific types of cohesive patterning and coherence. It was concluded that the cohesion of a text, as defined by Halliday and Hasan, bears no direct, causal relationship to the coherence of text. (RL)
Journal of Experimental Education, 2003
This paper describes a study aimed at expanding research on the interactive effect of readers' prior knowledge and text coherence on learning by introducing a third variable, topic interest, which is, the readers' relatively stable affective orientation toward a topic. The hypothesis was that the inferential processes required to fill in information gaps cannot be activated by prior knowledge, topic interest, and their interaction. High school students (n=160) were selected from a wider sample on the basis of their levels of prior knowledge and topic interest to make up 4 groups: (1) high knowledge with high interest; (2) low knowledge with low interest; (3) high knowledge with low interest; and (4) low knowledge with high interest. Students in each group read one of three versions of a scientific text about the greenhouse effect, which differentiated regarding cohesion level. They then carried out four tasks aimed at tapping both superficial and deeper levels of text understanding. It was expected that high-knowledge and high-interest readers would perform best regardless of text coherence, and high-knowledge and low-interest readers would perform better with globally coherent text, as would low-knowledge and high-interest readers. Low-knowledge and low-interest readers were expected to perform worst, especially with minimally coherent text. Results substantially confirm the hypothesis and show the complex interaction between cognitive and affective aspects on learning from text. When prior knowledge is low, topic interest can compensate for it and may help text understanding at text base level. When prior knowledge is high, high topic interest may help understanding at the level of text base. In two of the four tasks, the high-knowledge and high-interest group, which performed best in all tasks, benefited more from reading a minimally coherent text, but in general, the other groups scored highest reading a locally and globally coherent text. Future research questions and educational implications are outlined. (Contains 5 figures, 2 tables, and 27 references.) (Author/SLD) Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document.
Cohesion, coherence, and expert evaluations of writing proficiency
2010
This study investigates the roles of cohesion and coherence in evaluations of essay quality. Cohesion generally has a facilitative effect on text comprehension and is assumed to be related to essay coherence. By contrast, recent studies of essay writing have demonstrated that computational indices of cohesion are not predictive of evaluations of writing quality. This study investigates expert ratings of individual text features, including coherence, in order to examine their relation to evaluations of holistic essay quality. The results suggest that coherence is an important attribute of overall essay quality, but that expert raters evaluate coherence based on the absence of cohesive cues in the essays rather than their presence. This finding has important implications for text understanding and the role of coherence in writing quality.
The Interactive Strategy Trainer for Active Reading and Thinking (iSTART) is an intelligent tutoring system that provides students with automated training on reading strategies. In particular, iSTART trains students to selfexplain target sentences so as to integrate encoded information into a coherent mental representation. The goal of this study was to investigate the relation between text structures and the generation of bridging and elaborative inferences during self-explanation. We developed a computational model in which textual cohesion was interpreted as matrices of textbase cohesion values, such as argument overlap or semantic similarity, but also as matrices of situation model cohesion values such as causality. The model successfully predicted the different types of selfexplanations as a function of the textual cohesion. We also found that students' prior knowledge interacts with the textual cohesion effect when cohesion was based on situation model indices.
Many proposed cohesion metrics focus on the number and types of explicit cohesive ties detected within a text without also considering differences in the ease or difficulty of required referential and connective inferences. A new cohesion measure structured to address this limitation is proposed. Empirical analyses confirm that this new measure performs similarly to existing measures when applied to the simpler problem of detecting lower and higher cohesion versions of the same text, yet is significantly more effective than existing measures when applied to the more complex problem of distinguishing different texts rated by human experts as requiring lower or higher levels of reading comprehension skill. Implications of these findings relative to the goal of helping teachers and other educators select texts for use in instruction and assessment are discussed.