In the ITACA project, the Institute or Applied Linguistics aims to analyse text quality and coherence in essays written by Italian L1 students of upper secondary schools in South Tyrol. The project aims at creating a corpus that is annotated for traits of problematic cohesion and coherence features in the students’ language and evaluated for (holistic and analytical) coherence by human raters. While in this project we look at how students build coherence in texts from an educational perspective to help inform teachers, we also address theoretical issues of coherence models and related linguistic resources, evaluate shallow discourse parsing approaches and try to model discourse coherence computationally. The resulting ITACA corpus will be made available on PORTA in late 2023.
Website: https://itaca.eurac.edu/
Tags: discourse coherence, student essay corpora, text quality, writing research