My PhD follows on from my masters thesis project, which assessed the readability of federal parlimentary texts in Australia.
TLDR for my masters thesis: Legislation is complex and despite there being a document type to help explain it to the public (the ‘explanatory memorandum’), these documents are still written at a very high readability level. The explanatory memorandum is often less helpful than it appears. The thesis examines explanatory memoranda in terms of readability, jargon, common vocabulary, and design structures.
Within my PhD, I’m looking at a much smaller selection of legislative texts, as I’m sending them to three large language models and asking them to produce explainer documents at a lower ‘readability’ level based on four key prompts. This means I end up with a lot of text to analyse.
I’m planning on producing a few articles from this work, which I’ll drop below once they’ve been formally published.
The final code will be available on my github once my PhD is complete, and I’ll put a link for that here once it’s done as well.
Outputs
Sorry, it’s still a bit too early, there are no outputs present yet.