Détection automatique des unités linguistiques permettant le maintien de la producton écrite (2025)

Abstract: La production textuelle est segmentée par des pauses en jets textuels de longueur variable, interprétés comme manifestant une certaine cohérence cognitive dans la rédaction. Pour favoriser la fluence de ce processus, les scripteurs peuvent avoir recours à des unités linguistiques qui permettent de maintenir le flux de la production. L’objectif de cette contribution est de proposer une méthode de TAL pour détecter automatiquement ces unités. Nous l’appliquons à un corpus d’apprenants écrit en anglais L2 et montrons, d’une part, que les unités de structuration du texte (connecteurs, etc.) opèrent souvent de manière isolée, et d’autre part que la production peut être maintenue par le recours à des stratégies de complémentation (syntagme prépositionnel, proposition infinitive) qui permettent d’élaborer à partir d’un contenu déjà en place.

## introduction writing production is a fundamentally heterogeneous process, interspersed with pauses that hint at ongoing cognitive processes @xcite . however, these disfluencies in the writing process may be alleviated to some extent thanks to the recourse to linguistic devices that sustain the production and prolong the burst of writing between two pauses @xcite . for example, the intraphrasal occurrence of the conjunction et @xcite in french has been shown to associate with longer bursts @xcite . so far, however, there has been no systematic investigation of which linguistic units may play such a role. our contribution is intended to fill this gap. ## discussion we acknowledge several limitations in our work. first, the frequency threshold (10 hits) is somehow problematic in that it does not distinguish a form used very often in one specific idiolect from a form that is widespread among the writers. second, revisions may artificially increase the bursts' length, in that they split the content of words over several successive sequences, even though we tried to partly alleviate this issue by applying the effects of within-word revisions in the pre-processing step. third, we only considered 3-grams, but a combination of several n-grams would likely be preferable; for instance, the text structuring 2-gram in conclusion is also typical of shorter bursts. our results nonetheless point to an intriguing fact. the longer bursts are characterized by units tied to generic and 'universal truths' statements, like we do not (e.g. we do not pay attention to our history lessons), will always be, or people who have, which refers to a loosely identified group (e.g. people who have back problems). it seems that writers are therefore fluent when asserting general-truth statements. conversely, when they introduce nuances (some of them), specifications (the age of ), or discuss category membership (is not a), they tend to stop and be more disfluent. a more general question pertains to how these units relate to phraseological 'teddy bears' @xcite , to the gradual acquisition and functional diversification of lexical bundles throughout the learning process @xcite , and to the transfers from l1 in the use and frequency of these lexical bundles @xcite . however, these studies focus on the frequencies of use of these bundles and not on the contrasted role they play with respect to fluency, which may explain why most established lexical bundles do not play a role in our analysis. ## conclusion in this paper, we automatically extracted the 3-grams most characteristic of longer bursts, hypothesizing that they help sustain the writing production. we showed that text structuring markers are associated with disfluencies (they are often produced in isolation or at the end of a burst), while phraseological units introducing prepositional phrases -a device largely adopted by learners of english @xcite -or infinitive clauses help sustain the writing production in allowing the possibility of elaborating on an existing theme.