The Cognitive Complexity of Texts and Its Formal Measurement in Cognitive Linguistics

In order to rigorously measure the cognitive complexity of texts in natural languages, a formal metric is developed that provides a fundamental measure for the properties of syntax and semantics in textual comprehension, processing, and search. The objective and subjective aspects of text comprehension and their complexity are formally modeled. A formal language model is introduced that characterizes the discourse of natural languages. The mathematical models of cognitive complexity of texts and their properties are rigorously described at the sentence, paragraph, and essay levels from the bottom up. On the basis of the cognitive and mathematical models of cognitive linguistics, the measurement of cognitive complexity of texts is quantitatively established and tested by a set of case studies. A wide range of applications of the measurement of textual complexity are identified in cognitive linguistics and contemporary web technologies such as cognitive search engines, online document retrieval, natural language processing, cognitive linguistics, cognitive machine learning, computing with words, and cognitive computing.