On the use of computers to assess the educational concepts complexity
The article discusses the problem of automating the procedure for assessing the semantic complexity of "ordinary" words and scientific concepts, which is necessary to determine the educational text complexity. The complexity of the concept P relative to thesaurus Z is understood as the value numerically equal to the smallest number of "simple" words from thesaurus Z required to explain the essence of the concept P. At the same time, all scientific concepts can be divided into 7 categories, which correspond to the following complexity values: 1 - 2 - 4 - 8 - 16 - 32 - 64. To assess the concept complexity, the method of paired comparisons, the method of comparing concepts with the complexity scale and the method of "calculating" complexity are used. Three computer programs in the Pascal language are considered: 1) the program that randomly presents pairs of compared concepts (objects), perceives the expert's answers and writes the results to a file; 2) the program that processes the resulting file and calculates the concept complexity; 3) the program that displays the evaluated objects (scientific concepts) and a complexity scale containing reference concepts, perceives expert assessments and calculates the resulting assessment. The proposed programs can be used to evaluate other qualities of scientific concepts (objects).