Sentence Complexity in French: a Corpus-Based Approach

Language complexity is a notion widely used in a number of linguistic fields and language applications, and can be described by a number of linguistic features and practical measures. This work proposes a closer, data-oriented look at sentence complexity. Starting from a number of different studies, we selected and implemented 52 linguistic features and measured them on a corpus of varied French texts. Using statistical methods, we identify five underlying dimensions of sentence complexity. In addition to providing a better understanding of the phenomenon, these dimensions have been used in some information retrieval experiments.