The Construction Complexity Calculator (ConPlex): A tool for calculating Nelson’s (2024) construction-based complexity measure

The current study aims to increase the accessibility of Nelson’s (2024) recently suggested construction-based complexity measure by providing a tool that can calculate the measure for single or multiple texts. To validate the tool, complexity scores for the International Corpus Network of Asian Learners of English corpus (ICNALE) were compared with Nelson’s (2024) results. In addition, complexity scores were calculated for a new dataset, the Common European Framework of Reference English Listening Corpus (CEFR), along with the MERLIN corpus, which includes learner writing samples from learners of Czech, German, and Italian. Complexity scores generally increased across CEFR levels in all of the datasets. However, the complexity scores in the current study tend to be higher than the original study due to differences in the sentence splitting approach. The sentence tokenisation method used is deemed to be more appropriate, and it may be concluded that the Construction Complexity Calculator (ConPlex) tool accurately calculates Nelson’s measure. It is hoped that the tool will allow researchers to calculate the complexity of constructions at the text level for a wide range of research purposes.