ISOQOL 2004 Symposium
"Stating the Art: Advancing Outcomes Research Methodology and Clinical Applications"
June 27-29, 2004
Boston Park Plaza Hotel
Boston, MA, USA

Monday, June 28, 2004

2:00 - 4:00 pm
Session 4: Qualitative Research Methods
Presenters: James Pennebaker and Arthur Graesser
Chair: Ivan Barofsky

What our words say about us:
Use of computerized text analysis in research and practice
James Pennebaker, PhD
Dept. of Psychology, University of Texas, Austin, TX

The words people use in natural speech or writing conveys a great deal about their social situation, personality, and current psychological states. Much of this information is inherent in function words such as articles, pronouns, and prepositions. By using a computerized text analysis program, we have been able to demonstrate that function words do much better than chance in predicting depression, suicidality, hormone levels, dominance in a relationship, sex, age, social class, etc. Implications for assessing quality of life will be discussed.

Automated Systems that Analyze Text and Discourse:
AutoTutor, Coh-Metrix, and QUAID
Arthur C. Graesser, PhD
Professor, Dept. of Psychology, University of Memphis, Memphis, TN

Recent advances in computational linguistics, cognitive science, and discourse processes make it more feasible for computers to comprehend text at varying degrees of depth and to respond in an adaptive, flexible manner. The presentation will describe three systems that analyze text and discourse, developed in the Institute for Intelligent Systems at the University of Memphis. AutoTutor simulates human tutorial dialog, with an animated agent that holds conversations with students in natural language. Coh-Metrix is a web facility that analyzes texts on over 200 measures of language, cohesion, and text coherence. QUAID (Question Understanding Aid) is a web facility that critiques survey questions on potential problems of unfamiliar terms, vague relative terms, unclear noun-phrases, syntactic complexity, and working memory overload.