CompArg: Comparative Sentences 2019 dataset for comparative argument mining is composed of sentences annotated with BETTER / WORSE markers (the first object is better / worse than the second object) or NONE (the sentence does not contain a comparison of the target objects). The BETTER sentences stand for a pro-argument in favor of the first compared object and WORSE-sentences represent a con-argument and favor the second object.

ObjectiveWe aimed to systematically review recidivism rates in individuals given community sentences internationally. We sought to explore sources of variation between these rates and how reporting practices may limit their comparability across jurisdictions. Finally, we aimed to adapt previously published guidelines on recidivism reporting to include community sentenced populations.MethodsWe searched MEDLINE, PsycINFO, SAGE and Google Scholar for reports and studies of recidivism rates using non-specific and targeted searches for the 20 countries with the largest prison populations worldwide. We identified 28 studies with data from 19 countries. Of the 20 countries with the largest prison populations, only 2 reported recidivism rates for individuals given community sentences.ResultsThe most commonly reported recidivism information between countries was for 2-year reconviction, which ranged widely from 14% to 43% in men, and 9% to 35% in women. Explanations for recidivism rate variations between countries include when the follow-up period started and whether technical violations were taken into account.ConclusionRecidivism rates in individuals receiving community sentences are typically lower in comparison to those reported in released prisoners, although these two populations differ in terms of their baseline characteristics. Direct comparisons of the recidivism rates in community sentenced cohorts across jurisdictions are currently not possible, but simple changes to existing reporting practices can facilitate these. We propose recommendations to improve reporting practices.

INTRODUCTION In recent decades English phrasal verbs (PVs) have attracted considerable attention from researchers taking a cognitive linguistics (CL) perspective, particularly ones concerned with instructed second language (L2) vocabulary acquisition. CL-inspired proposals for facilitating the acquisition of PVs by L2 learners involve developing learners’ awareness of plausible relationships (e.g., ones involving metaphor and image schema transformations) between meanings of PVs and imageable, physically grounded meanings of the constituent words (CWs) and of the prepositions especially. The plausibility of these proposals would be enhanced if it could be shown that the imageability of PVs is generally similar in magnitude to the imageability of their CWs. A novel perspective on this issue is afforded by a quantitative study of the imageability of specific senses of 150 frequent PVs and their CWs. Because imageability ratings were lacking for these PVs and for some of their CWs, new ratings were collected. These ratings and associated statistics are presented here along with instructions given to raters and other data used in the study. The inventory is given not far below. The project and its findings have been described in a paper shortly to be submitted.

INVENTORY 1) Concreteness ratings (Brysbaert, Warriner & Kuperman, 2014) (BWK) for 1791 English two-word expressions & their CWs – used in the study as a comparison sample 2) Instructions to imageability (IM) raters--one regarding single words (incl. CWs of PVs) & one regarding phrases (incl. PVs) 3) New and old IM ratings & BWK concreteness ratings of 256 single English words, plus glosses & descriptive statistics 4) New meaning-specific IM ratings of 150 high frequency PVs and 160 extra items 5) New IM ratings of the PVs & their CWs, plus Literality ratings

ITEM-BY-ITEM DESCRIPTION

1) Concreteness ratings

These concreteness ratings, which relate to expression composed only of content words, figured in the study as a comparison sample. Items rated for concreteness were chosed only because a suitable sample rated for IM was unavailable. Over 99.5% of the data given in the table are simply a rearrangement of data compiled by Brysbaert, Warriner and Kuperman (BWK) (2014). I am grateful to Marc Brysbaert for his generous attitude regarding this re-presentation of so much of the data collected by him and his colleagues (http://crr.ugent.be/archives/1330). BWK's database includes 2896 two-word expressions, mostly compound nouns. For purposes of the phrasal verb study it was necessary to screen the 2896 expressions by eliminating ones that include a CW which (a) has no BWK concreteness rating, (b) usually begins with a capital letter, and (c) is hyphenated in BWK’s list. It was also appropriate to screen out the majority of the expressions which include an obvious homograph (n = 145). However, several fairly high frequency homographs, such as school, were retained on the assumption that the great majority of BWKs raters would have had the same meaning in mind for each of these words. (BWK’s raters encountered all to-be-rated items of context with no part of speech tagging.). As an example of my procedure for retained homographs, BEACH BALL was retained but MASKED BALL was screened out. Thirty-three additional comparison expressions with validated concreteness ratings were drawn from a list compiled by Lindstromberg and Eyckmans (2020). Whole-expression ratings from this second source are given in capitals. Italicized capitals indicate that ratings from the two sources were averaged. All CW ratings come from BWK. By structure, the approximate breakdown of the 1791 expressions is: N-N, 68%; Adj-N or gerund-N (e.g., ACADEMIC YEAR, BAKING TRAY), 29%; other (BLOW SMOKE, SKIN DEEP), 3%.

Item 2. The instructions are closely based on those of Paivio, Yuille, and Madigan (1968) but with added mention that imagery can be motoric.

Item 3: Imageability (IM) ratings of 256 single English words

The 256 new IM ratings given here include ratings of the CWs of the focal PVs. The remaining words were included partly to serve as list-initial calibrator (i.e., orienting) items for raters or as fillers between the target words. Also, by including extra words, the overall sample size could be increased so that a narrower confidence interval would result when it came time to calculate that validating correlation between the new ratings and previously validated, previously published IM ratings. The latter come from Bird et al. (2001), Cortese & Fugett (2004), Friendly et al. (1982), MRC Psycholinguistic Database (Coltheart 1981; Wilson 1988), Schock et al. (2013), and Scott et al. (2019). When a word has a previously validated rating in more than one database, I took the unweighted mean of the reasons. (The number of raters per word is usually similar.) Exceptions were made for words rated by Bird et al. and Scott et al. Bird et al. always, and Scott et al. sometimes, gave their raters disambiguating information about about the meaning of a to-be-rated orthographic form (e.g., in the case of Bird et al., the relevant part of speech). The concreteness ratings come from BWK (2014). NB: All IM ratings are on a 1 to 7 scale but the concreteness ratings are on a 1 to 5 scale.

ITEM 4: 310 new IM ratings and associated data

These 310 IM ratings, which are on a 1 to 7 scale, relate to 150 phrasal verbs (PVs), two single verbs, and 308 non-PV two-word phrases. Since it was desirable for all PV raters to have the same meaning in mind, the raters were provided with a gloss for each PV having no single very dominant meaning and for a few that do have a single very dominant meaning. The 150 PVs are those making up Garnier and Schmitt’s (2015) Phrasal Verb Pedagogical List. This list presents the 150 most frequent English PVs in order of their frequency in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) (Davies, 2008 to present). For each PV Garnier and Schmitt’s list states the relative frequency of its appreciably frequent meanings (or senses). My study targeted the most frequent meaning of each PV. The concreteness ratings, which come from BWK , were used to validate the new IM ratings since no previously validated IM ratings for the 308 phrases could be found. The concreteness ratings of the 158 non-PV phrases were most important in this regard.

ITEM 5: The 150 PVs specifically, includes literality ratings. This list presents the 150 focal PVs) in order of their frequency in COCA).

For each PV, Garnier & Schmitt’s list states the relative frequency of its appreciably frequent meanings (or senses). My study targeted the most frequent meaning of each PV with the exception of CATCH UP – whose second most frequent meaning was targeted – because the most frequent meaning relates only to caught up in.

REFERENCES

Bird, Helen, Sue Franklin & David Howard, D. (2001). Age of acquisition and imageability ratings for a large set of words, including verbs and function words. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, and Computers 33(1). 73–79. https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03195349

Brysbaert, Marc, Amy Warriner & Victor Kuperman. (2014a). Concreteness ratings for 40,000 generally known English word lemmas. Behavior Research Methods 46(3). 904–911. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-013-0403-5

Chiarello, Christine, Claudia Shears & Kevin Lund. (1999). Imageability and distributional typicality measures of nouns and verbs in contemporary English. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments and Computers 31(4). 603–637. https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03200739

Coltheart, Max. (1981). The MRC Psycholinguistic Database, Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 33A(4). 497–505. https://doi.org/10.1080/14640748108400805

Cortese, Michael and April Fugett. (2004). Imageability ratings for 3,000 monosyllabic words. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, and Computers 36(3). 384–387. https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03195585

Davies, Mark. (2008–present). The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). http://www.americancorpus.org

Friendly, Michael, Patricia Franklin, David Hoffman & David Rubin. (1982). The Toronto Word Pool. Behavior Research Methods and Instrumentation 14(4). 375–399. http://datavis.ca/papers/twp.pdf

Gardner, Dee and Mark Davies. (2007). Pointing out frequent phrasal verbs: A corpus-based analysis. TESOL Quarterly 41(2). 339–359. https://doi.org/10.1002/j.1545-7249.2007.tb00062.x

Garnier, Melodie and Norbert Schmitt. (2015). The PHaVE List: A pedagogical list of phrasal verbs and their most frequent meaning senses. Language Teaching Research 19(6). 645–666. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362168814559798

Lindstromberg, Seth and June Eyckmans. (2020). The retrievability of L2 English multiword items in a context of strongly form-focused exposer: What matters? Studies in Second Language Acquisition. Advanced view. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0272263120000315

Paivio, Allan, John Yuille & Stephen Madigan. (1968). Concreteness, imagery, and meaningfulness values for 925 nouns. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 76(1, Pt. 2), 1–25. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0025327

Schock, Jocelyn, Michael Cortese & Maya Khanna. (2013). Imageability ratings for 3000 disyllabic words. Behavior Research Methods 44(6). 374–379. https://doi.org/10.1080/17470218.2012.722660

Scott, Graham, Anne Keitel, Marc Becirspahic, Bo Yao & Sara Sereno. (2019). The Glasgow Norms: Ratings of 5,500 words on nine scales. Behavior Research Methods 51(3). 1258–1270. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-018-1099-3

Wilson, Michael. (1988). The MRC Psycholinguistic Database: Machine readable dictionary, Version 2. Behavioural Research Methods, Instruments and Computers 20. 6–11. http://websites.psychology.uwa.edu.au/school/MRCDatabase/uwa_mrc.htm

In 2023/24 the average custodial sentence length for sexual offences in England and Wales was 69.5 months, or just over five years, the most of any broad offence type in that year. Other crimes that carried high prison sentences were robbery offences at 45.2 months, and drug offences at 41.4 months. The average length of a prison sentence for all offences in 2024 was 22.5 months, while the offences that carried the shortest sentence lengths were motoring offences. Court backlog a major concern The number of crown court cases awaiting trial in England and Wales reached a high of over 62,700 cases in 2022, almost double the number of outstanding cases in 2019. Although the number of new crown court cases has actually been declining, the courts have struggled to keep pace by closing existing cases, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic. As a consequence of these pressures, the amount of time between a criminal offence taking place and the conclusion of the case has also risen. In 2014, it took an average of 412 days for an offence to reach a conclusion in the courts, with this rising to 697 days by 2021. The UK prison system The prison population of the United Kingdom was estimated to number approximately 92,800 people, as of 2023, the vast majority of which were in England and Wales. In 2021/22, the average cost of a prison place in England and Wales was estimated at 46,696 British pounds, compared with 48,162 pounds in the previous financial year. Of the various prisons across UK jurisdictions the largest one in terms of capacity was HMS Oakwood in the West Midlands, which had a prison population of 2,087 in 2023. Despite the construction of relatively new prisons such as Oakwood, prison overcrowding has increased recently. In September 2023, for example, there were just 768 spare prison places in England and Wales compared with almost 2,600 in April 2022.