TAASSC 1.3.8: gives incredibly large numbers that don't seem right

[Djuna Kanters]

Good afternoon professors and students, 

I'm using TAASSC to investigate syntactic complexity in 300 dating profile texts for my Master's thesis. I'm investigating only the 'noun phrase elaboration' from  'components' and 'mean length of T-unit' from  'sca', however both measures give really weird numbers in the analysis. 

Firstly, the noun phrase elaboration measures are mostly negative numbers... I don't imagine this being possible. Does anyone have a clue why i get negative results? The numbers are also really big, see example: 

Secondly, the mean length of T-unit is calculated weirdly. The numbers have huge differences between each other as you can see...

Other basic info: I'm using the TAASSC 1.3.8 version on Windows 11. The texts vary from 100 to 250 words. I'm using txt files only, however some have the code 'Windows (CRLF)’ and others have the code ‘Unix (LF)'. Could this be a part of the problem and how could i change it? 

I would be extremely grateful for any suggestions on how to move forward with this analysis. 

Kind regards,

Djuna Kanters 

[Djuna Kanters]

Hi everyone, 

I figured out what the problem was with my analyses after almost 7 days of trying 'everything', and I thought I'd share it with you for those who might be struggling with the same thing in the future. Myself, I would have loved to find the solution in the thread. 

So, the problem with my results was that Excel did not recognize the comma's in the files which lead to the fact that numbers with a lot of decimals were shown as huge numbers since there were no commas shown. It took me almost a week to recognize this (note that I never work with Excel).

What you should do if your TAASSC output gives really large numbers is the following: 

1. open the output file in Notepad

2. replace ',' with ';' 

3. replace '.' with ',' 

4. save your file and open it in Excel

5. choose 'divide with ';' 

I hope this will help anyone in the future. 

Kind regards,

Djuna Kanters  

Op woensdag 14 juni 2023 om 14:25:57 UTC+2 schreef Djuna Kanters: