Towards a R omanian Phrasal Academic Lexicon (2024)

Abstract: The lack of NLP based research studies on academic writing in Romania results in an unbalanced development of automatic support tools in Romanian compared to other languages, such as English. For this study, we use Romanian subsets of two bilingual academic writing corpora: the ROGER corpus, consisting of university student papers, and the EXPRES corpus, composed of expert research articles. Working with the Romanian Academic Word List / RoAWL, we present two phrase extraction phases: (i) use Ro-AWL words as node words to extract collocations according to the thresholds of statistical measures and (ii) classify extracted phrases into general versus domain-specific multi-word units. We show how manual rhetorical function annotation of resulting phrases can be combined with automatic function detection. The comparison between academic phrases in ROGER and EXPRES validates the final phrase list. The Romanian phrasal academic lexicon (ROPAL), similar to the Oxford Phrasal Academic Lexicon (OPAL), is a written academic phrase lexicon for Romanian language made available for academic use and further research or applications.

## introduction we present the first approach to creating the romanian phrasal academic lexicon (ropal) foot_0 for written romanian language. academic writing is a challenge for students and experienced writers alike. studies @xcite have pointed out that linguistic support is effective at all levels of language use and acquisition. among the multitude of support options, e.g. grammatical accuracy, lexical diversity, paraphrasing @xcite , multi-word units with a rhetorical function, i.e. academic phrases, are the most productive in enhancing the coherence and persuasiveness of academic writing @xcite . thus "opportunities to practice bundle usage so as to trigger acquisition of formulaic language" (pérez-llantada, 2014) are associated with higher academic writing proficiency. these phrases ensure that writers comply with specialized academic conventions and further contribute to the development of writers' language skills, facilitating their ability to articulate complex ideas and arguments with precision and refinement. from a computational linguistics perspective, phrasal academic lexicons can serve as invaluable resources for training large language models to improve their proficiency in language generation and paraphrasing. at the same time, academic phrase lists can contribute to training llm models to automatically annotate rhetorical functions. as a result, ai tools can be improved, which can help with tasks such as genre classification, stylistic analysis, and discourse segmentation, thereby enhancing the automated processing and understanding of academic texts. when compiling lists of academic phrases, specialized corpora such as academic writing corpora can be of great assistance in identifying prevalent language patterns and rhetorical strategies across different academic disciplines or crossdisciplinarily. although most extraction and analysis methods have been performed for phraseology extraction and use in l2 (english) (section 2), their replicability for academic writing in l1 has been demonstrated @xcite . in the present paper, we use the expres corpus and the romanian academic world list / ro-awl @xcite (section 3) to extract phrases in ropal. highly frequent phrases (first 150 occurrences in ropal) are manually annotated for rhetorical functions (section 5). we use an adaptation of two rhetoric function systems proposed by @xcite and by @xcite for the english language. in the end, we verify whether ropal can detect learner academic writing phrase patterns by using the roger corpus @xcite (section 5). ## related work most research on academic multiword units was done in the context of english for academic purposes (eap), where considerable attention was placed on finding a core academic phrasal lexicon that could be used across disciplines. these phraseological resources are informed by both eap research and eap practice, as academic writing is widely taught in university settings. typically, eap research uses academic writing corpora from which common multiword units are identified using computational methods. after extraction, the phrases are assigned rhetorical and functional categories (see e.g. @xcite ). these findings are then integrated into various learning and teaching resources for academic writing. for instance, they may be presented into standalone phrase lists (e.g. @xcite ) or phrasebooks (e.g. morley (2018)) categorized by rhetorical and functional attributes. more recently, phrases have also been integrated into digital learners' dictionaries (see opal (2019)), or have become part of ai-powered academic writing platforms, such as writefull foot_1 . in contrast to the abundance of resources available for english, research on academic phraseological units in other languages is scarce. to the best of our knowledge, no study to date has aimed at identifying cross-disciplinary academic phraseological units in a language other than english. existing investigations predominantly adopt a comparative approach, such as @xcite , which compares english and spanish academic phraseological units. in the case of romanian, research is rather characterized by heterogeneity, both in theoretical frameworks, terminologies and methodologies employed @xcite . while some researchers refer to 'pragmatic functions' (rovent ¸a-frumus ¸ani, 2012; @xcite , others may use terms such as 'metalinguistic markers' @xcite , 'special-ized syntagms' @xcite . this lack of standardization in terminology makes it challenging to compile comprehensive online resources, such as lists of various types of phraseological units or academic vocabulary or conventions. unlike languages with more robust digital resources, such as english, the availability of openly accessible linguistic data for romanian is limited. even though the last two decades have seen various initiatives launched @xcite , efforts have lacked sufficient coordination. while specific micro-studies have been conducted to analyze a restricted number of phraseological units across limited disciplines comparatively @xcite , only one study has focused on multiword units in romanian academic writing @xcite . it explored the difference between expert academic writing produced by romanian scholars and novice academic writing produced by romanian university students. ## method several language datasets are used in this study. the corpus of expert academic writing in romanian and english / expres @xcite and the romanian academic word list / ro-awl @xcite were used in the creation of ropal. subsequently, the corpus of romanian academic genres / roger @xcite is used to test ropal. the datasets and the extraction procedures are described in the following sections. ## utilization in this section, we will test the ropal list on the romanian section of the roger corpus @xcite , also available online ( https://rogercorpus.org/). we first selected the most frequent 10 n-grams from ropal, and searched them in the whole roger corpus, then in similar disciplinary datasets in expres (economics, humanities, political sciences, computer science). the numbers are listed in an expected pattern, since we identified common features across disciplines. in fact, the novice writing samples from roger do not present sufficient discipline-specific characteristics. for instance, the domain-specific units identified in expres are poorly represented in roger. students tend to focus more on elaborating their discourse than on the development of a discipline-specific language. therefore, greater exposure to specialized articles would enable students to familiarize themselves with the conventions and expectations of their micro-academic community. ## conclusions the findings presented in the study highlight several key points regarding the development and application of the romanian phrasal academic lexicon (ropal) in computational linguistics and language education. firstly, since the main objective of the current study was to verify the capacity of our generated academic phrase lexicon to support the automatic assessment of academic writing proficiency in the native language romanian (which was demonstrated by the fact that coverage percentages are lower in novice versus expert writing), iaa was not performed. secondly, the extraction and annotation of academic phrases from the expres corpus demonstrate the didactic applicability of using corpora to compile resources adapted for the needs of romanian academic writers. the phrase extraction and classification approaches provide insights into prevalent language patterns and rhetorical strategies across different academic disciplines, but also across disciplines. thus, a pilot ropal list (i.e. ropal for teaching), similar to the opal list (opal, 2019), to be used for teaching and edu-cation purposes, was compiled foot_2 . it contains the prominent rhetorical categories in romanian academic phrases, based on the complete opal list generated for computational purposes. such a list is particularly novel because, until now, no equivalent resource has existed for the romanian academic setting. most items in ropal for teaching represent general academic writing multi word units (e.g. [translation from romanian into english] "also", "from the point of view", "regarding") whereas others are rather discipline-specific or have a higher probability of being used more frequently in a particular disciplinary field. this list will be adapted for various disciplines and validated through interrater agreement (iaa) methods. further studies using ropal and the rhetoric function annotation for each phrase may result in the creation of ai tools for academic text correction, text suggestion and text assessment in the romanian language. ropal enhances students' ability to engage with and produce academic work that adheres to the rhetorical standards of their field.