LATIC–A linguistic analyzer for text and item characteristics

by Nadine Cruz Neri, Florian Klückmann, Jan Retelsdorf

Analyzing texts and items regarding their linguistic features might be important for researchers to investigate the effects of the linguistic presentation as well as for practitioners to estimate the readability of a text or an item. The Linguistic Analyzer for Text and Item Characteristics (LATIC) is a software that enables users to analyze texts and items more efficiently. LATIC offers a multitude of features at three different reading levels and can be used for texts and items in four different languages: English, French, German, and Spanish. It is open source, free to use and designed to be user-friendly. In this study, we investigated LATIC’s performance: LATIC achieves highly accurate results, while being extremely time saving compared to human raters. While developing LATIC, the respective features are tested continuously to ensure a high accuracy of results in the future.