Friends of the BSR,

First of all, thank you to everyone who came out to the seminar and release party last week. We’re really excited about the spring issue (and hope you are too!) and fired up to get started on the next installment for fall 2012.  So, seasoned and aspiring science-writers and bloggers alike, please contact us and let us know what you’d like to see in Issue 23!

Outside of high school English classes, most people don’t give much thought to pronouns, prepositions, articles, auxiliary verbs, and other “function words” (e.g., I, to, of, am, the). They seem to be no more than fillers for the more important content words–the who, what, where, and why of language. But it turns out that these invisible words have psychological significance. In his new book, The Secret Life of Pronouns, psychologist James Pennebaker describes findings from his research on the relationship between natural language use, personality, and social life. Much of this research is conducted using a computerized linguistic analysis program that calculates the percentage of words in a given text that fall into a range of grammatical, emotional, and topical categories.

On the book’s website, Pennebaker features six simple linguistic that have the potential to reveal aspects of your personality and your compatibility with others. I tried out a few of them…

When I glanced at the title of a recent New York Times piece on automated essay grading, “Facing a Robo-Grader? Just Keep Obfuscating Mellifluously,” I assumed it was just another fluffy popular science article. Surely no serious organization would use a computer program to grade essays. Not long into the article, however, I discovered that the “robo-grader,” named the E-rater, was developed not by university scientists but by the Educational Testing Service — the organization that administers the GRE and the TOEFL, among other exams.

For now, E-rater only grades essays that are also read by a human grader. Though the grades given by humans and E-rater have been remarkably similar, Les Perelman, an MIT professor, has his reservations about the software. After a month of testing, he has determined that E-rater favors long paragraphs and sentences, connecting words like “moreover,” and words with many syllables. Most troubling is that the E-rater can’t determine the truth or intellectual coherence of statements in the essay, used to hilarious effect in an example essay  by Perelman.