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Top1. Introduction
Measures for assessing academic writing have drawn much attention in the research over the past few decades. While early investigators have mostly focused on syntactic complexity like the mean length of T-units and clausal subordination as measures for academic writing (e.g., Larsen-Freeman, 1978; Wolfe-Quintero et al., 1998; Ortega, 2003), more recent research has turned to examine complexity at phrasal levels to assess academic writing (e.g., Ortega, 2015; Parkinson & Musgrave, 2014; Staples et al., 2016; Kyle & Crossley, 2018; Lan & Sun, 2019; Ruan, 2018). Criticism of these two lines of research has found that the conventional measures like T-units and clausal subordination cannot generate consistent results and have failed to capture particular nuances pertaining to non-clausal features that writers display as they gain writing competence, such as complexity at phrasal levels (Ortega, 2003; Norris & Ortega, 2009). This criticism has led researchers to question the adequacy of clausal complexity as measures for academic writing (e.g., Lu, 2011; Taguchi et al., 2013).
Research has demonstrated that complex noun phrases (NPs), are “characteristic of advanced academic writing” (Biber et al., 2011, p. 11). Researchers have argued that NP complexity is highly predictive of writing proficiency, development, and quality, and this growing body of research has shown that more experienced writers tend to produce more complex NPs (e.g., Biber et al., 2011; Ortega, 2015; Staples et al., 2016; Parkinson & Musgrave, 2014; Kyle & Crossley, 2018). While these studies have enriched the understanding of the interrelationship between academic writing and NP complexity, most of them have focused on academic writing by university students of applied linguistics, warranting further investigation into the extent to which NP complexity functions in the shaping of a relatively compacted academic genre, such as computer science conference abstracts.
Computer science (CS) is an original discipline combining natural science, engineering and mathematics, and this diversity brings specificity unique to CS (Meyer et al., 2009). A recent study found out that frequency of first-person pronouns in CS research articles exceeds in the number of Literature by 2.5 times, which differs from the established view of hard science featuring fewer first-person pronouns than soft science (Cheung & Lau, 2020). The unique disciplinary features in CS such as being innovative and fast-changing make it crucial to promptly disseminate research results and advance disciplinary knowledge and practices. A CS conference offers researchers a more valuable on-site venue to share insights, seek feedback, and invite potential collaborations than a journal because of its speed and effectiveness, and therefore a prestigious CS conference is more favored for presenting original research among CS researchers (Ernst, 2006; Meyer et al., 2009; Patterson et al., 1999; Vrettas & Sanderson, 2015). According to Ernst (2006), in CS, in addition to a timely manner, conferences are more privileged than journals in terms of “status”, “visibility and impact”, “quality”, and “standards of novelty”. Not surprisingly, many CS conferences “have become the sole record of research advances in the sub-discipline they represent” (Vrettas & Sanderson, 2015, p. 2674). Additionally, unlike conference abstracts in other disciplines, in which researchers can present their unfinished research proposed with few results and conclusions (Cutting, 2012), CS conference abstracts are much more of “a selling job” (Swales & Feak, 2009) asking for a paper with a result or conclusion at the same time.