Analysing the Evolution of Students’ Writing Skills and the Impact of Neo-standard Italian with the help of Computational Linguistics
Authors: Rachele Sprugnoli, Sara Tonelli, Alessio Palmero Aprosio, Giovanni Moretti (Fondazione Bruno Kessler, 2018)
Topic: Learner Corpora and Language Acquisition

Abstract
We present a project aimed at English. We present a project aimed at studying the evolution of students’ writing skills in a temporal span of 15 years (from 2001 to 2016), analysing in particular the impact of neo-standard Italian. More than 2,500 essays have been transcribed and annotated by teachers according to 28 different linguistic traits. We present here the annotation process together with the ﬁrst data analysis supported by NLP tools.

Introduction
In this work, we present an extensive study on the evolution of high-school students’ writing skills, taking into account essays spanning 15 years (from 2001 to 2016). In particular, we are interested in tracking the presence of expressions and constructions typical of neo-standard Italian (Berruto, 2012), in the light of the recent public discussion on the ‘decline of Italian in schools’ 1. 1See the open letter signed by around 600 University professors at http:// gruppodifirenze.blogspot.it/2017/02/ contro-il-declino-dellitaliano-scuola. html. The Italian neo-standard is the current linguistic register in Italy, in which forms previously considered colloquial have become widely accepted in the national language. We analyse more than 2,500 essays written by students from different high-schools in the Autonomous Province of Trento during the exit exam (the so-called Maturit`a). The study is the outcome of a project comprising different steps: i) digital acquisition and transcription of thousands of essays balancing their distribution across school years and school types; ii) computer-assisted annotation of some linguistic traits of interest; iii) diachronic analysis of the traits. While the ﬁrst step has been carried out by the Istituto provinciale per la Ricerca e la Sperimentazione educativa (IPRASE), we led steps ii) and iii), which are discussed in the next sections. Beside an in-depth and diachronic study of the evolution of students’ writing skills, a major contribution of this paper is also the release of the corpus in the form of embeddings and n-grams. 2 Corpus Collection The staff of IPRASE have digitized and transcribed essays stored in the archives of 21 secondary schools located in different areas of Trentino Province. These areas include both the two major cities, Trento and Rovereto, but also other communities in the valleys (Val di Fiemme, Val di Non, Valsugana) and Riva del Garda. Nine different types of schools were involved: liceo classico, liceo scientiﬁco, liceo artistico, liceo linguistico, liceo musicale e coreutico, liceo delle scienze umane, istituto tecnico tecnologico, istituto tecnico economico and istituto professionale. Six school years were chosen between 2000-2001 and 2015-2016, thus having a temporal span of 15 years for a total of 2,544 essays and almost 1.5 million words. Table 2 shows the distribution of essays per year with the corresponding number of

Conclusion
In this work, we have presented a project aimed at tracking the evolution of students’ writing skills over time. The goal of this work was not only to introduce the corpus collection and annotation activities, but also to show how this kind of projects can beneﬁt from NLP by speeding up annotation and increasing data consistency. In the future we will complete the analysis of all the traits for a more comprehensive view of the role of neostandard Italian in students’ essays. We will also use some of the manual annotations to train new NLP modules performing the same task automatically. A