PLA Home About Us Contact CassBeth Products

Sustainable
System Engineering

Plain Language Analysis Tool

Plain Language Analysis tool is a new revolutionary analysis tool to help users create clear, concise, unambiguous documents using the Plain Language technique.

On June 1, 1998, President Clinton issued an executive memo requiring agencies to write in plain language.gov. Several statutes have also admonished agencies to write certain types of documents in plain language. Our Plain Language Analysis (PLA) tool is based on the SAT technologies; this tool allows a user to analyze documents using Plane Language Analysis Templates. The Plain Language Analysis Templates can be created by any user and applied in any of our document analysis tools. This tool is specifically for those chartered with the Pain Language compliance tasks.

Who is PLA for and what does it do for us?

PLA is for anyone involved in editing, publishing, and reviewing documents. Plain Language is about communications so PLA also includes templates from our other tools that can help anyone understand a document.

So...

PLA is for every  legislator and government representative on earth. As we ponder our actions and seal our role in history. As we create legislation and serve the forces we decide to serve.

PLA is for every teacher and student in every country on earth. If you are able to use an Internet search engine you are able to use PLA. So children can use it in their history and social studies classes that we provide.

PLA is for every professor and advanced student in every country on earth. It allows the serious academic to ruthlessly slice through text and provide quantitative results of our studies. It helps to remove the bias of our cultural and educational past.

PLA is for every human on earth. To help us understand our present and our history. To ruthlessly slice through a document and gather the evidence that its content reveals.

Description . Theory . Features . Global Warming Sample Analysis

PLA


Brochures
Manuals
Purchase
Download

Other Tools


Search and Mining

Fuzzy Mining Tool

General Document Analysis

Medical Transcript Analysis

Specification Analysis Tool

Plain Language Analysis Tool

Legislative Analysis Tool

Constitutional Analysis Tool

Legal Document Analysis

Support

Template Suggestions

Support

Engine Suggestions

Alternative Application Requests

Description

PLA allows a user to analyze legislation, constitutions, studies, and any other document you can imagine and first make it clear, concise, and unambiguous using the Plain Language technique and second analyze it for major themes. Its powerful mining techniques are based on predefined and user rules that can be saved as templates to support any future analysis.

PLA is a method and tool that allows you to create your own document analysis rules. Embedded within PLA are certain fundamental principals such as services and layering of services from simple to complex. This principal allows the tool to immediately provide results to you as you change the rules to fit your studies and needs even if it is just creating by-laws for a new student club or as important as analyzing major policy documents in complex areas like Global Warming.

PLA comes loaded with sample documents, legislation, and constitutions. You can use the Internet to find other documents, legislation, or constitutions and bring them into PLA for your studies. You can save your results and distribute them to others for review and comparison.

Representative Screen Shot - PLA has much more...

You upload your document and press submit.

Your results are listed with color, status, and descriptive text of the finding.

Too much information, no problem, enable and disable the reports as you need to accomplish your analysis and study.

Need to modify or create a rule, just check show rules and author what you need.

Rules are grouped into services so that you can perform very different analysis within a single template.

Rules are independent of your uploaded file format. Your file can be an HTML, spreadsheet, or a text version of your document.


Representative Screen Shot - PLA has much more...


Representative Screen Shot - PLA has much more...

The preloaded Plan Language rules include: Plain Language Guidelines for documents and legislation, approaches to Problem solving suggested by the document, Word Themes, Reading Level, etc.

The preloaded legislation rules include: Text Clarity, Legislative Elements, Committees, Roles, Special Interests, Representatives, Reading Level, Word Themes, etc.

The preloaded constitution rules include: Text Clarity, Government Type, Inalienable Rights, Separation of Powers, Roles, Representatives, Current Challenges, etc.

In the end metrics are gathered so that you can make quantitative comparisons.

The beauty of PLA is its ability for you to define your own rules. It comes preloaded with a set of rules that allow you to immediately start your studies while at the same time providing you with real world examples to help you synthesize your special rules for your world.

Global Warming Sample Analysis

The European Union recently produced a document, "Green Paper, A European Strategy for Sustainable, Competitive and Secure Energy". We submitted this document to PLA and this is our findings.

Yes the document does have some Jargon and could be subjected to the Plain Language Guidelines. We then proceeded to submit the document for content analysis.

In our first analysis we uploaded the document and selected the "Word Themes" service. Scrolling to the "Accessed Words" area we noticed immediately that technology was after market and competitiveness. This was very interesting.

In our second analysis we created a new service called "Approaches", which is now a standard template in PLA. We created the Markets and Technology rules. Our initial findings were confirmed, there was less emphasis on technology. We then proceeded to add Education and Science as a single rule and we were shocked to see no "hits" in the document.

In our third analysis we split Education and Science into their own rules and then we added the remaining rules to the "Approaches" template. Scrolling into the table we see that there are no "hits" for Science, Education, or Engineering. From our perspective, it was shocking to see no roles in these areas. We did see some hits associated with system and analysis, but when we selected the option to view these objects we were not impressed.

In our final analysis we selected key words from the Accessed Words area. Our raw findings are as follows: Community . International . Technology . Technical . Systems. Our conclusions are: The people are on their own, there is no help from science, education, engineering, etc. It appears that the "international" entity is on its own, there is no help from science, education, engineering, etc. International is reinforced with imperatives suggesting this is very important. Systems is not viewed as a potential approach to address the problem. Rather there are references to systems which are the problem. Basically the approach to Global Warming in this document appears to rely on markets and competition, the same tools some would argue as the source of the problem, and hope that some abstract international effort will solve the problem.

We could continue further with our conclusions and start offering recommendations, but the intent was to demonstrate the cold hard analysis findings using a tool like PLA and not to address the issues of the document. Now for the frightening part: we did not read the document. Let us know if our conclusions based on a 5 minute use of PLA are incorrect. The target document was "Green Paper, A European Strategy for Sustainable, Competitive and Secure Energy".

PLA Theory

PLA is based on SAT technologies, an engineering tool.

It is a process and method instantiated with Internet technologies to analyze documents. It is not unlike an Internet search engine, however instead of returning web pages, PLA returns lines of text from a document under analysis. It begins with uploading a document or pointing to a directory of data, subjecting the data to an engine, and directing the engine to process the data based on user defined rules similar to Internet search engines. The user fills in search criteria, checks some boxes, and provides unique text descriptions related to a rule.

Our products share a common characteristic; the potential need for someone to process documents based on rules. The PLA rules deal with the Pain Language movement. Most of our initial products are based on the need to process and understand precisely written statements, but not all the products, including PLA, must slice and dice precise text. For example, it is trivial to add a rule to find all acronyms in a document. It is also possible to create rules to verify compliance to an outline. It is also simple to use PLA as a collection of highlighter pens (yellow, pink, orange, etc) on your document. However, the PLA core is for people to help users create clean documents using Plain Language.

Features

Overall
- Help with Use Cases
- Audio Power Point Training Modules
- HTML Reporting
- Accepts txt, csv, html, and doc formats
- Accepts DOORS Exports using Excel .csv
- Attempts Automatic .doc Parse
- PUI Preservation or Generation, if None Present

Control
- User Defined Imperatives
- Process Only Imperatives or Process all Option
- Remove Blank Lines Option
- Remove HTML Tags Option
- Preview Uploaded Document Prior to Analysis
- Library Documents, Templates, Reports, Analysis

Authoring
- User Authored Templates, Services, & Rules
- Template Naming, Description, and Summary
- Rule Naming, Description, and Attributes
- Reading Level Report
- Document Shape Report
- Find Approximate Duplicates Using Masking
- Document Structure Analysis
- Capabilities Analysis
- Key Requirements Analysis
Reporting
- Significant Report Display Filtering
- User Accept or Reject Of Each Object
- Full or Partial Rule Reports on Each Object
- Object Hyper Links to Document for Context
- Object Hyper Links To Rule with Short Report
- User Defined Noise Word Filtering
- Profile of all Document Words and Counts
- Profile of all Missed Words in Rules
- Key Word Analysis Context Search

Metrics
- Metrics Assessment: is this a Spec or not
- Multidimensional Metric Counts including Norm
- Hyper Links From Each Metric To Rule


Cassbeth Inc. Copyright © 1997 - 2005 All Rights Reserved.