Jargonness
Jargonness is a piecewise mathematical function mapping the frequencies of a word's appearance in scientific and contemporary English corpora to a parameter quantifying the word's association with scientific jargon - the "jargonness" of that word.[1] It is expressed mathematically as[2]:
[math]\displaystyle{ jargonness = \begin{cases} log \left ( \frac{f_s}{f_g} \right ), & f_g \gt 0 \\ 3, & f_g = 0 \end{cases} }[/math]
In the above equation, [math]\displaystyle{ f_g }[/math] stands for the frequency of a word's appearance in a general English-language corpus and [math]\displaystyle{ f_s }[/math] stands for its frequency in a scientific corpus.
Method of use
Both the frequencies ([math]\displaystyle{ f_g }[/math] and [math]\displaystyle{ f_s }[/math]) must be determined and then substituted in the above equation to calculate the word's jargonness. In case a word has no mention in the general English corpus, 3 is taken as its jargonness as suggested by the second part of the equation.[2] Noticing that the logarithm in the first part of the equation is a common one (to the base 10), this simply means that the word is assumed to be a thousand times more likely to appear in a scientific text than a non-scientific one.
Examples of corpora
The corpora that have most commonly been employed to determine the frequencies mentioned above are the following:[2]
- Professional English Research Consortium Corpus (for scientific vocabulary; 17 million words)
- British National Corpus (for common vocabulary; 97 million words)
References
- ↑ Sharon, Aviv J.; Baram-Tsabari, Ayelet (January 21, 2013). "Measuring mumbo jumbo: A preliminary quantification of the use of jargon in science communication". Public Understanding of Science 23 (5). https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0963662512469916?journalCode=pusa.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 Willoughby, Shannon D.; LaMeres, Brock J.; Hughes, Bryce E.; Organ, Chris; Green, Jennifer L.; Sterman, Leila Belle; Davis, Kent (2018). "STEM Storytellers: Improving the Oral Communication Skills of STEM Graduate Students". https://monolith.asee.org/public/conferences/106/papers/22100/view.
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