%0 Conference Proceedings %T CoCoGen - Complexity Contour Generator: Automatic Assessment of Linguistic Complexity Using a Sliding-Window Technique %A Marcus, Ströbel %A Kerz, Elma %A Wiechmann, Daniel %A Neumann, Stella %Y Brunato, Dominique %Y Dell’Orletta, Felice %Y Venturi, Giulia %Y François, Thomas %Y Blache, Philippe %S Proceedings of the Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Linguistic Complexity (CL4LC) %D 2016 %8 December %I The COLING 2016 Organizing Committee %C Osaka, Japan %F marcus-etal-2016-cocogen %X We present a novel approach to the automatic assessment of text complexity based on a sliding-window technique that tracks the distribution of complexity within a text. Such distribution is captured by what we term “complexity contours” derived from a series of measurements for a given linguistic complexity measure. This approach is implemented in an automatic computational tool, CoCoGen – Complexity Contour Generator, which in its current version supports 32 indices of linguistic complexity. The goal of the paper is twofold: (1) to introduce the design of our computational tool based on a sliding-window technique and (2) to showcase this approach in the area of second language (L2) learning, i.e. more specifically, in the area of L2 writing. %U https://aclanthology.org/W16-4103 %P 23-31