InfoWave

An open source tool for analysing information in text

About

What is this tool for?

This tool currently under development, so this is just a demo.

The tool will be for analysing the information density of text. The tool can be used by researchers in cognitive science, practitioners in health and business communication, diagnosticians assessing language impairments, or by anyone who might find information density analysis useful. This tool uses word probabilities (frequencies) from large samples of natural language to estimate the trajectory of information in a given sentence. Users will be able to find out what the information density of their text is, and the tool will suggest alternatives for each sentence with more optimised information density (where a more optimal distribution is possible).

Ideally, information should be distributed throughout a sentence evenly, rather than clustering at a certain point. This even, uniform distribution means that anything that interrupts a hearer or reader's processing of the sentence - from noise to short lapses in attention - is less likely to impair their overall understanding of the utterance or text. We feed the word probabilities in any sentence you provide to an algorithm which attempts to distribute information more uniformly if it can. The tool will show you the actual information density of your text, as well as a potential optimum.

Click 'Analyse' on the left to see what the tool will look like.