Rating the Technicality of the Brown Corpus

The Brown Corpus is a collection of 500 two-thousand-word texts built in the 1960s as representative of American written language of that time. The corpus constructors identified fifteen different genres, broad types of text, on the basis of which they chose their samples. Our goal here is to rate the _technicality_ of each of those genres, and of a sample of documents, using your own view or intuition of what is and what is not a technical text. There is no definition of text technicality you can work with, except your own definition or informal understanding.

Thirty Brown texts that we need rated are available on the Test Document Collection (TDC) page.

Please read all texts and rate their technicality using the scale shown later in these instructions. You may work on all texts in one genre together, but it is not a requirement of this experiment. (Genre is indicated by the alphabetic letter after the hyphen in a text's title: 'br-c05' -> genre 'c'.)

Your rating can be carried to one decimal place. (This change from the integer scale used in the original experiment is meant to allow you to discriminate more exactly between the 30 texts in this sample.) Feel free to use only the five integer values, or maybe values 1.0, 1.5, 2.0, 2.5 etc., if you think that 0.1 is too fine a granularity.

The rating scale is as follows:

TECHNICAL----------- RATHER------------ NEUTRAL------------ RATHER-------- NON-TECHNICAL
-------------------------- TECHNICAL------------------------------- NON-TECHNICAL
------- 1.0---------------------- 2.0---------------------- 3.0---------------------- 4.0---------------------- 5.0
---------|--------------------------|--------------------------|--------------------------|--------------------------|

Enter your ratings on the little form that follows, and email them to Terry (terry@csi.uottawa.ca).

Thanks!!!

br-a05:

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br-a44:

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br-b22:

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br-c02:

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br-c05:

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br-d02:

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br-d05:

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br-e06:

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br-e29:

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br-f03:

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br-f20:

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br-g01:

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br-g32:

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br-h05:

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br-h30:

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br-j01:

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br-j13:

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br-j74:

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br-k02:

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br-k22:

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br-l02:

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br-l20:

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br-m02:

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br-m05:

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br-n01:

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br-n16:

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br-p01:

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br-p15:

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br-r01:

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br-r07:

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