Statistics on the Length and Linguistic Complexity of Bills

Research 2012-02-13 · 1 min read

Where would you go to find out what the longest bill of the 112th Congress was by number of sections (H. R. 1473)? How about by number of unique words (H.R. 3671)? What about by Flesch-Kincaid reading level (S. 475)?

Histogram showing the distribution of log word counts across bills in the 112th Congress — Distribution of log word counts across bills in the 112th Congress.

Head on over to this table of bills, updated daily for the 112th Congress, which contains the following fields: Bill Name, Publish Date, Bill Title, Stage, Section Count, Sentence Count, Word (Token) Count, Unique Words (Tokens), Unique Stem Count, Avg. Word Length, Avg. Sentence Length, and Reading Level (Flesch-Kincaid).

I'll be adding more automated analysis and figures over the next few weeks, but for now, here's a morsel to get your gears turning.

computational-law natural-language-processing data-science research

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