Edward Gibson: prediction

Transcript context

…It’s an emergent phenomena. Okay. We’ll get to that. We’ll get to that. But we wanted to see what first as opposed… Because it turns out that we’re not the first to observe that legalese is weird. Back to Nixon had a plain language act in 1970 and Obama had one. Boy, a lot of these presidents that said, “Oh, no, we’ve got to simplify legal language. Must simplify it.” But if you don’t know how it’s complicated, it’s not easy to simplify it. You need to know what it is you’re supposed to do before you can fix it. So, you need a psycholinguist to analyze the text and see what’s wrong with it before you can fix it. You don’t know how to fix it. How am I supposed to fix something I don’t know what’s wrong with it? And so what we did, that’s what we did. We figured out, okay, just a bunch of contracts, had people… And we encoded them for a bunch of features. Another feature, one of them was center embedding. That is basically how often a clause would intervene between a subject and a verb, for example. That’s one center embedding of a clause, and turns out they’re massively center embedded. So, I think in random contracts and in random laws, I think you get about 70%, something like 70% of sentences have a center embedded clause, which is insanely high. If you go to any other text, it’s down to 20% or something. It’s so much higher than any control you can think of, including, you think, people think, oh, technical, academic texts. No, people don’t write center embedded sentences in technical academic texts. They do a little bit, but it’s on the 20%, 30% realm as opposed to 70. So, there’s that and there’s low frequency words. Then people, oh, maybe it’s passive. People don’t like the passive. Passive for some reason, the passive voice in English has a bad rap, and I’m not really sure where that comes from. And there is a lot of passive, there’s much more passive voice in legalese than there is in other texts- And passive voice accounts for some of the low frequency words?…

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