6/11/2012: I MADE IT! Today I met with mentor, Ani Nenkkova, and some fellow interns who will be contributing to this research endeavor. The overall vision behind our research is looking at good article writing. Some research has been done on this subject by a graduate student Annie Louise who has created a corpus of New York Time articles. The first articles that were picked for this corpus were the ones that appeared in the Best Of collection of the Times and then from there the corpus was expanded by adding in other articles from those authors. The articles are then separated into four columns that based on how well the writing is considered. The lowest forth column is then considered average writing. With this corpus we are going to look at the leads or attention getters of a some articles from the Times and looking at what makes up an attention getter. We will be looking at what words are used, the frequency and commonality of the word throughout attention getters, and the uniqueness of the word. We have also decided to take into account the subject of the article. We understand that a sports article could have very different attention gets than say a business article. Other beginning tasks include looking over some research articles on similar topics to get our brains into the topic and begin to think about what types of information we are going to be working with. I spent some time looking at the "Age-of-acuistion, imagery, concreteness, familiarity, and ambiguity measures for 1,944 words" and their list of words in which they looked at words’ imagery, age of acquisition, frequency, and concreteness (as seen in the name). I found the wordlist very intriguing. It was especially fun to look through and see if I agree with the numbers. The abiguity measures seemed a little confusing. I understand what they were trying to by words having abiguity if they had two or more different meanings; however, there were some words that didn't have any ambiguity that I though should. The article can be downloaded here: http://www.springerlink.com/content/wr5315hrjl2gt1v2/
By the way the picture above I took during my first trip to the lab I will be working at. I think I've got a sense of this work atmosphere already.