Running head: TEXTUAL COHERENCE USING LATENT SEMANTIC ANALYSIS
The Measurement of Textual Coherence with Latent Semantic Analysis

Peter W. Foltz
New Mexico State University
Walter Kintsch and Thomas K. Landauer
University of Colorado
Foltz, P. W., Kintsch, W. & Landauer, T. K. (1998). The measurement of textual
coherence with Latent Semantic Analysis. Discourse Processes, , 25, 2&3, 285307.

Abstract
Latent Semantic Analysis is used as a technique for measuring the coherence of
texts. By comparing the vectors for two adjoining segments of text in a high
dimensional semantic space, the method provides a characterization of the degree of
semantic relatedness between the segments. We illustrate the approach for
predicting coherence through reanalyzing sets of texts from two studies that
manipulated the coherence of texts and assessed readers' comprehension. The
results indicate that the method is able to predict the effect of text coherence on
comprehension and is more effective than simple termterm overlap measures. In
this manner, LSA can be applied as an automated method that produces coherence
predictions similar to propositional modeling. We describe additional studies
investigating the application of LSA to analyzing discourse structure and examine
the potential of LSA as a psychological model of coherence effects in text
comprehension.


References
Britton, B. K., & Gulgoz, S. (1991). Using Kintsch#s computational model to
improve instructional text: Effects of repairing inference calls on recall and
cognitive structures. Journal of Educational Psychology, 83, 329345.
Deerwester, S., Dumais, S. T., Furnas, G. W., Landauer, T. K., & Harshman, R.
(1990). Indexing by latent semantic analysis. Journal of the American Society for
Information Science, 41(6), 391407.
Flesch, R. (1948). A new readability yardstick. Journal of Applied Psychology,
32, 221233.
Fletcher, C. R., Chrysler, S. T., van den Broek, P., Deaton, J. A., & Bloom, C. P.
(1995). The role of cooccurrence, coreference, and causality in coherence of
conjoined sentences. In R. F. Lorch & E. J. O'Brien (Eds.), Sources of coherence in
reading. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Foltz, P. W. (1996). Latent Semantic Analysis for textbased research.
Behavior Research Methods, Instruments and Computers, 28(2), 197202.
Foltz, P. W., Britt, M. A., & Perfetti, C. A. (1996). Reasoning from multiple
texts: An automatic analysis of readers' situation models. In G. W. Cottrell (Ed.)
Proceedings of the 18th Annual Cognitive Science Conference (pp. 110115).
Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Grosz, B., & Sidner, C. (1986). Attention, intentions and the structure of
discourse. Computational Linguistics, 12,3, 175204.
Klare, G. R. (1963). The measurement of readability, Ames: Iowa State
University Press.
Halliday, M. A. K., & Hasan, R. (1976). Cohesion in English. London:
Longman.
Hearst, M. A., & Plaut, C. (1993). Subtopic Structuring for FullLength
Document Access. In Proceedings of the Sixteenth Annual International ACM
SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval,
Pittsburgh, 5968.
Kintsch, W. (1988). The role of knowledge in discourse comprehension: A
constructionintegration model. Psychological Review, 2, 95, 163182.
Kintsch, W. (1992). A cognitive architecture for comprehension. In H. L Pick,
Jr., P. van den Broek, & D. C. Knoll (Eds.) Cognition: Conceptual and methodological
issues (pp. 143164). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Kintsch, W. (in press). Comprehension: A paradigm for cognition. New York:
Cambridge University Press.
Measuring Coherence 29
Kintsch, W. & van Dijk, T. (1978). Toward a model of text comprehension
and production. Psychological Review, 85, 363394.
Kintsch, W. & Keenan, J. M. (1973). Reading rate and retention as a function
of the number of the propositions in the base structure of sentences. Cognitive
Psychology, 5, 257274.
Kintsch, W., & Vipond, D. (1979). Reading comprehension and readability in
educational practice and psychological theory. In L. G. Nilsson (Eds.), Perspectives on
Memory Research. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Landauer, T. K., & Dumais, S. T. (1997) A solution to Plato's problem: The
Latent Semantic Analysis theory of the acquisition, induction, and representation of
knowledge. Psychological Review, 104, 211240.
Landauer, T. K., Foltz, P. W., & Laham, D. (this issue). An introduction to
Latent Semantic Analysis. Discourse Processes.
Lorch, R. F. & O'Brien, E. J. (Eds.). (1995). Sources of coherence in reading.
Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
McNamara, D. Kintsch, E., Butler Songer, N., & Kintsch, W. (1996). Are good
texts always better? Interactions of text coherence, background knowledge, and levels
of understanding in learning from text. Cognition and Instruction, 14(1), 143.
Miller, J. R., & Kintsch, W. (1980). Readability and recall of short prose
passages: A theoretical analysis. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human
Learning and Memory, 6, 335454.
Morris, J., & Hirst, G. (1991). Lexical cohesion computed by thesaural relations
as an indicator of the structure of text. Computational Linguistics, 17(1), 2148.
Salton, G., & McGill, M. J. (1983). Introduction to modern information
retrieval. NY: McGrawHill.
Trabasso, T., Secco, T., & van den Broek, P. (1984). Causal cohesion and story
coherence. In H. Mandl, N. Stein, & T. Trabasso (Eds.). Learning and
comprehension of text. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Turner, A. A. (1987). The propositional analysis system (Tech. Rep. No. 872).
Boulder: University of Colorado, Institute of Cognitive Science.
van Dijk, T. A., & Kintsch, W. (1983). Strategies of discourse comprehension.
New York: Academic Press.
Wolfe, M. B., Schreiner, M. E., Rehder, R., Laham, D., Foltz, P. W., Kintsch,
W., & Landauer, T. K. (this issue). Learning from text: Matching readers and text by
Latent Semantic Analysis. Discourse Processes.
