Oana-Iuliana Popescu


2021

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A German Corpus of Reflective Sentences
Veronika Solopova | Oana-Iuliana Popescu | Margarita Chikobava | Ralf Romeike | Tim Landgraf | Christoph Benzmüller
Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Natural Language Processing (ICON)

Reflection about a learning process is beneficial to students in higher education (Bub-nys, 2019). The importance of machine understanding of reflective texts grows as applications supporting students become more widespread. Nevertheless, due to the sensitive content, there is no public corpus available yet for the classification of text reflectiveness. We provide the first open-access corpus of reflective student essays in German. We collected essays from three different disciplines (Software Development, Ethics of Artificial Intelligence, and Teacher Training). We annotated the corpus at sentence level with binary reflective/non-reflective labels, using an iterative annotation process with linguistic and didactic specialists, mapping the reflective components found in the data to existing schemes and complementing them. We propose and evaluate linguistic features of reflectiveness and analyse their distribution within the resulted sentences according to their labels. Our contribution constitutes the first open-access corpus to help the community towards a unified approach for reflection detection.