=Paper= {{Paper |id=Vol-2253/paper56 |storemode=property |title=A NLP-based Analysis of Reflective Writings by Italian Teachers |pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2253/paper56.pdf |volume=Vol-2253 |authors=Giulia Chiriatti,Valentina Della Gala,Felice Dell'Orletta,Simonetta Montemagni,Maria Chiara Pettenati,Maria Teresa Sagri,Giulia Venturi |dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/clic-it/ChiriattiGDMPSV18 }} ==A NLP-based Analysis of Reflective Writings by Italian Teachers== https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2253/paper56.pdf
        A NLP-based Analysis of Reflective Writings by Italian Teachers
    Giulia Chiriatti• , Valentina Della Gala? , Felice Dell’Orletta , Simonetta Montemagni ,
                    Maria Chiara Pettenati? , Maria Teresa Sagri? , Giulia Venturi
                                         •
                                           Università di Pisa
                                 giuliachiriatti@gmail.com
           ?
             Istituto Nazionale Documentazione, Innovazione, Ricerca Educativa (INDIRE)
                    {v.dellagala,mc.pettenati,t.sagri}@indire.it
     
       Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale “Antonio Zampolli” (ILC-CNR) - ItaliaNLP Lab
                                 {nome.cognome}@ilc.cnr.it

                       Abstract                           Macerata is based on the alternation of laborato-
                                                          rial and traditional classroom activities with doc-
      English. This paper reports first results of        umentation and reflection activities. The purpose
      a wider study devoted to exploit the po-            is “to influence practices through a process that al-
      tentialities of a NLP-based approach to the         ternates between moments of immersion and dis-
      analysis of a corpus of reflective writings         tancing, which are actualised in When I teach and
      on teaching activities. We investigate how          When I reconsider my teaching to think of what
      a wide set of linguistic features allows re-        happened” (Magnoler et al., 2016). An on-line
      constructing the linguistic profile of the          environment developed and managed by INDIRE2
      texts written by the Italian teachers and           was set up to support teachers to reflect about and
      predicting whether are reflective.                  document their educational and professional activ-
                                                          ities (see Figure 1) during the induction program.
      Italiano. L’articolo descrive i primi risul-        All evidences of the instructional tasks (surveys,
      tati di uno studio più ampio che impiega           writing tasks, lesson plans, instructional materials,
      strumenti e metodi di analisi e classifi-           etc.) are collected in the e-portfolio and printed by
      cazione automatica del testo per descri-            the teachers for the final exam. An yearly monitor-
      vere le caratteristiche linguistiche di un          ing of teachers activities is carried on by INDIRE
      corpus di documenti scritti dai neoassunti          to assess the effectiveness of the whole induc-
      nella scuola italiana che riflettono su una         tion program, as well as of the single instructional
      specifica esperienza didattica.                     tasks. It is aimed to modify, whenever needed, the
                                                          program in order to improve stakeholders’ scaf-
                                                          folding to the newly qualified teachers and lastly
1     Introduction                                        teachers’ professional development.

Since 2014, the “National Institute for Docu-
mentation, Innovation and Educational Research”
(INDIRE) manages for the Ministry of Educa-
tion (MIUR) the induction program of the Italian
Newly Qualified Teachers (NQTs), i.e. the induc-
tion phase of teachers professional development
that aims to support teachers in their transition
from their initial teacher education into working
life in schools. Experimented for the first time          Figure 1: The on-line environment collecting the
in 2014, it became effective starting in 2015 with        e-portfolio of the newly qualified teachers.
the DM 850/2015.1 The program involves all new
hiring teachers from primary to secondary school             In this paper, we report first results of an on-
for a total of 130,000 NQTs committed in the last         going study devoted to investigate the potentiali-
3 years. The underlying theoretical framework             ties offered by Natural Language Processing meth-
developed by INDIRE, MIUR and University of               ods and tools for the analysis of the NQTs e-
  1                                                           2
    http://neoassunti.indire.it/2018/files/DM 850 27 10         The       e-portfolio       is   available   at
2015.pdf                                                  http://neoassunti.indire.it/2018/
portfolio. We consider in particular the documents        think”, Dewey provides the most shared defini-
written by the 26,526 teachers hired in the 2016/17       tion of reflective thinking as applied in the edu-
school year. Many protocols (or models) have              cational field: reflection may be seen as an “ac-
been proposed to assess reflection in teachers writ-      tive, persistent, and careful consideration of any
ing, e.g. (Sparks-Langer et al., 1990; Hatton and         belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light
Smith, 1995; Kember et al., 2008; Larrivee, 2008;         of the grounds that support it and the further con-
Harland and Wondra, 2011). These models rely on           clusions to which tends”. Hence, reflection is a
features that suggest either different levels of re-      systematic process of thinking that happens only
flection (means focused on the depth of reflection)       if related to actual experiences, and includes ob-
or content of reflection (focused on the breadth          servation of conditions and references to different
of reflection), and usually they have found to mix        pieces of knowledge, (i.e. references to previous
features of both classes (depth and breadth) (Ull-        experiences, domain knowledge, common sense
mann, 2015). We rather focus here on the anal-            knowledge, etc.), in order to respond to a dilemma
ysis of the form to study which are the main lin-         (Mezirow, 1990). Teachers’ educators have ex-
guistic phenomena, distinguishing reflective from         tensively employed writing tasks, such as writing
non reflective writings. Specifically, we devised         structured or unstructured journals, portfolios, es-
a methodology devoted to investigate whether and          says, blogs, open-ended questions to foster reflec-
to which extent a wide set of linguistic features au-     tion both in pre-service and experienced teachers.
tomatically extracted from texts can be exploited         Operational definitions of reflectivity proposed to
to characterize NQTs’ reflective writings.                develop schemes for assessing it are focused on
   Our contribution: i) we collect a corpus of re-        identifying the presence of “reflective content” in
flective writings manually annotated by experts in        teachers’ writing, or how deep the reflection is.
the learning science domain and classified with re-          Based on these premises, we are currently de-
spect to different types of reflectivity; ii) we detect   veloping a reflection assessment schema suitable
a wide set of linguistically phenomena, character-        to describe properly the peculiarities of the Italian
izing the collected writings; iii) we report the first    teachers’ reflective writings written in the frame-
results of an automatic classification experiment to      work of the 2016/17 induction program. The
assess which features contribute more in the auto-        schema designed so far, reported in Table 1, was
matic prediction of reflexivity.                          devised according to the following criteria: a writ-
                                                          ing is reflective if it i) makes direct references to
2   Defining reflection                                   experienced teaching activity, ii) involves several
                                                          topics (content/pedagogical knowledge) and refer-
Within the teaching and teacher education domain,         ences to previous experiences, classroom manage-
a very large amount of studies have been dedicated        ment, learners needs, iii) includes premises anal-
to conceptualization and analysis of teachers re-         ysis (theoretical, context-related, personal) iv) de-
flection and teachers’ reflective practice. Dewey         bates a problem (a dilemma), a doubt, v) has an
(1933), Van Manen (1977), Schon (1984; Schon              output: it sums up what was learned, sketches fu-
(1987; Schon (1991), Mezirow (1990) are among             ture plans, gives a new insight and understanding
the main references. The attention on reflective          for immediate or future actions.
thinking in the teachers education field has in-
creased starting from the 80s as a reaction to            3   The Corpus
the overlay technical view of teaching. Scholars
have intensely studied reflection as a concept, de-       The corpus of NQTs reflective writings is part of
tected more levels and types of reflection, how           the wider collection of documents written by the
it works during and after professional teachers’          26,526 teachers engaged in the 2016/17 INDIRE
practice, its role and purpose in teachers’ profes-       induction program. The whole corpus includes all
sional development, and how it can be embedded            texts written in two of the seven activities of the
in the curriculum of teachers preparation or pro-         e-portfolio: Didactic Activity 1 and 2 (DA) for a
fessional development, and which techniques may           total of 265,200 texts. During these two activi-
be used to promote it (groups of discussion, read-        ties, teachers were supported by guiding questions
ings, oral interview, action research projects, writ-     designed by INDIRE experts to help them to un-
ing tasks, etc). In his seminal work “How we              derstand the consistency of the planned and acted
 Type of reflec-
                    Description                 Example
 tivity
                    Simple writing that
                    merely describes what
                    happened during the         I contenuti presentati sono stati acquisiti e gli alunni intervistati si sono di-
 No reflection      teaching activity, no       mostrati soddisfatti dell’intervento e del parere personale che hanno potuto
                    doubts or clues of an       esprimere sull’argomento di discussione.
                    inquiry attitude are
                    shown
                    Writing shows weak
                    links to the actual
                    teaching     experience,
                                                Per rispondere alla domanda circa la possibilità di migliorare l’attività af-
 General consid-    it is conducted at a
                                                frontata, dirò innanzitutto che ritengo sempre possibile migliorare le proprie
 erations and un-   distance    from      the
                                                prestazioni. Sono convinta che l’esperienza sia una grande alleata e che, col
 derstanding        phenomena of inter-
                                                tempo, si cresca, ci si arricchisca e si migliori.
                    est.    It can include
                    general thoughts and
                    considerations
                    Writing         includes    Credo che la scelta più efficace sia stata quella della valutazione tra pari.
                    considerations         on   In particolare, durante la fase della premiazione del concorso di poesia, un
                    actual classroom ac-        alunno per classe si è recato nell’altra scuola e ha tenuto un discorso intro-
 Descriptive re-    tions/events and some       duttivo alla premiazione, nonché gestito la stessa in autonomia. Questo, a
 flection           kind of knowledge base      mio avviso, ha fatto sentire gli studenti i veri protagonisti del loro lavoro e
                    but doesn’t clearly refer   ha favorito la motivazione, intrinseca ed estrinseca. Le consegne sono sem-
                    to any “problems”,          pre state fornite in modo chiaro, ma hanno necessitato diverse ripetizioni per
                    doubt or dilemma            essere assimilate.
                                                In realtà, mi sono accorta che solo pochi di loro erano capaci di dare una sp-
                    Writing discusses prob-     iegazione adeguata (anche dal punto di vista formale) e soprattutto non rius-
                    lems, doubts and refers     civano a trovare esempi calzanti se non con l’aiuto del libro di testo. Questo
                    to some kind of action.     momento di ricognizione ha portato via quasi il doppio del tempo che avevo
                    It may report a reflec-     previsto, ma è comunque stato molto utile per accelerare il loro compito di
                    tive practice.     There    ricerca durante l’analisi del nuovo testo proposto. Li ho stimolati a chiarire
 Reflection                                     ogni dubbio e grazie anche alle loro domande credo che gli argomenti siano
                    could be evidences of a
                    change on teachers’ at-     stati davvero appresi da tutti gli studenti, anche da chi di solito ha più dif-
                    titude or acquiring new     ficoltà o da chi normalmente partecipa meno. È stata una lezione che li ha
                    insights due to the prob-   molto coinvolti nonostante si trattasse di una lezione piuttosto “tradizionale”,
                    lems faced                  perché mi hanno detto che questo sarebbe servito loro anche per lo studio di
                                                altre materie e soprattutto in vista dell’esame.

                                    Table 1: Annotation schema of reflectivity.


teaching activities. For DA 1 and 2 they wrote                   ence domain according to the reflectivity annota-
5 short texts as answers to 5 different groups of                tion scheme described in Section 2 (see Table 2).
questions. The first 4 groups provide guidance for               The agreement between the three annotators was
teachers to write general reflections only on the                calculated using the Fleiss’ kappa test and we ob-
design of their teaching activity; the fifth group is            tained a k=0.66, i.e. substantial agreement.
meant to guide NQTs towards an overall reflec-
tion on their whole teaching experience, i.e. both                   Reflectivity          n. answers     n. sent.   n. tokens
                                                                     No reflection                185         348        9,784
the design and the real teaching activity, also in-                  Rhetoric                      35          91        3,140
cluding classroom assessment techniques.                             Reflection                   217         609       21,686
                                                                     Radical reflection            36         149        5,326
   We focused here on the answers to this lat-
                                                                     TOTAL                        473       1,197       39,936
ter group of questions that were devised in or-
der to encourage teachers to reflect on the follow-              Table 2: Corpus of NQTs reflective writings anno-
ing issues: i) differences and similarities between              tated for different types of reflectivity.
the designed and achieved activities, ii) the most
effective choices adopted, also including class-
room assessment techniques, iii) how the activity                4     Linguistic Features and Reflectivity
could be improved, iv) the role played by the tu-
tor and documentation practices. We considered                   The annotated corpus was tagged by the part-of-
in particular a subset of this group of answers that             speech tagger described in Dell’Orletta (2009) and
were annotated by 3 experts in the learning sci-                 dependency-parsed by the DeSR parser (Attardi
et al., 2009). This allowed to extract a wide                          If we focus on the linguistic profile of the dif-
set of multilevel features, i.e. raw text, lexical,                 ferent types of reflective writings, we can observe
morpho-syntactic and syntactic, fully described by                  that answers annotated as Reflection and Radi-
Dell’Orletta et al. (2013). They was used to recon-                 cal reflection are mostly characterized by features
struct the linguistic profile of reflective writings                typically related to structural complexity. This
and to carry out a first classification experiment                  is particular the case of Radical reflection an-
aimed at predicting whether a text is reflective.                   swers that are longer in terms of number of sen-
                                                                    tences and words; they have more complex ver-
4.1      Distribution of Linguistic Features                        bal predicates (e.g. an higher % of adverbs and
Table 3 shows a selection of the features that                      of an implicit mood such as gerundive that can
vary significantly i) between reflective and non-                   be more ambiguous with respect to the referential
reflective answers (column Reflectivity) and ii)                    subject), more complex use of subordination (e.g.
among the different types of reflectivity we con-                   average length of ‘chains’ of embedded subordi-
sidered (column Types of Reflectivity)3 . The analy-                nate clauses), long distance constructions (length
sis of variance was computed in the first case using                of dependency links), non canonical constructions
the Wilcoxon Rank-sum test for paired samples,                      (post-verbal subject). The higher % of demonstra-
while in the second case we used the Kruskal-                       tive pronouns and determiners can be related to
Wallis test since we aimed to assess the different                  one of the most representative characteristic of re-
distribution of features in the 4 classes.                          flection, i.e. the direct reference to real life. On the
   In both cases, features from all levels of analysis              contrary, they contain a simpler use of lexicon, e.g.
resulted to be significant. If we consider the first                a lower Type/Token ratio and an higher percentage
ten most discriminative features, reflective writ-                  of “Fundamental words”.
ings resulted to be longer in terms of number of
words and sentences, they are characterized by                      4.2   Prediction of Reflectivity
longer sentences and by a lower Type/Token Ra-
tio; they contain an higher number of verbal heads                  Table 4 reports the results of the automatic classi-
and of embedded complement ‘chains’ (governed                       fication experiment we devised in order to predict
by a nominal head). Interestingly, they mostly                      whether a text is reflective. We built a classifier
contain linguistic phenomena typically related to                   based on LIBLINEAR (Fan et al., 2008) as ma-
syntactic complexity, for example they are char-                    chine learning library trained using the LIBLIN-
acterized by i) an higher use of verbal modifica-                   EAR L2-regularized L2-loss support vector clas-
tion (e.g. higher % of adverbs, of auxiliary and                    sification function. We followed a 5-fold cross-
modal verbs), ii) more complex verbal predicate                     validation process and relied on a training set of
structures (e.g. higher average verbal arity, cal-                  370 answers balanced between the reflective and
culated as the number of instantiated dependency                    non reflective texts, since the under sampling tech-
links sharing the same verbal head), iii) more ex-                  nique has been proofed to improve classification
tensive use of subordination (e.g. higher % of sub-                 performance on unbalanced datasets (Qazi and
ordinate clauses also embedded in deep chains),                     Raza, 2012). The performance was calculated in
iv) features related to a non canonical word or-                    terms of F-score in the correct classification of
der (e.g. higher % of pre-verbal objects and post-                  non reflective (0 in the table) or of reflective (1)
verbal subjects), v) longer dependency links and                    writings. We used different classification models:
higher parse trees, two features related to sentence                the Raw text one uses only raw text features, the
length. On the contrary, non reflective NQTs’ an-                   Lexical one uses the distribution of the lexicon be-
swers contain an higher level of lexical complex-                   longing to the Basic Italian Vocabulary and up to
ity: they have an higher Type/Token Ratio, a lower                  bi-grams of words, the Morpho-syntactic one uses
percentage of “Fundamental words”, i.e. very fre-                   the unigram of part-of-speech and verbal morphol-
quent words according to the classification pro-                    ogy features, the All features model uses all the
posed by De Mauro (2000) in the Basic Italian                       considered features including the syntactic ones.
Vocabulary (BIV), and an higher percentage of                       A very competitive baseline was computed: it ex-
“High usage words”.                                                 ploits the distribution of unigrams of words (Un-
                                                                    igrams). As it can be seen, the model that uses
   3
       The full list of ranked features is contained in Appendix.   all the considered features resulted to be the best
    Feature                                                 Ranking position                Avg. Feature Value in different types of (non)reflective texts
                                                  Reflectivity   Types of Reflectivity     No reflection   Rhetoric      Reflection     Radical reflection
                                                                     Raw text features:
    Avg sentence length                               10                 11                       27.97         35.9             38.6                38.2
    Avg number of sentences                           9                   7                        1.88          2.6             2.81                4.14
    Avg number of words                               1                   1                       52.89        89.71            99.94              147.94
                                                                     Lexical features:
    Type/token ratio (100 token)                      8                   9                        0.78         0.71              0.7                0.69
    % of “Fundamental words” of BIV                   62                 86                       74.15        75.57            77.01               77.92
    % of “High usage words” of BIV                    92                 38                       19.35        15.79            15.71               14.92
    % of “High availability words” of BIV             58                 68                        9.72         12.8            10.78               10.69
                                                                Morpho–syntactic features:
    % of adjectives                                   71                87                         7.29         9.16             7.72                7.93
    % of possessive adjectives                        67                43                         1.08            2             0.97                0.93
    % of adverbs                                      42                46                         3.95         3.93             4.82                5.29
    % of prepositions                                 51                82                        15.11        17.08            16.61               16.05
    % of demonstrative pronouns                       36                34                         0.43         0.65             0.58                0.78
    % of demonstrative determiners                    35                30                         0.35         0.66             0.42                 0.6
    % of determinative articles                       30                41                         8.29         6.89             6.81                7.07
    % of subordinative conjunctions                   69                63                         0.94         0.68             0.98                1.27
    % of sentence boundary punctuation                12                12                         4.17         2.99             2.86                2.92
    % of auxiliary verbs                              25                27                         6.66         4.01             4.92                4.48
    % of modal verbs                                  40                40                         0.69         1.06             0.78                0.97
    % of verbs – subjective mood                      72                39                         1.16         1.29             2.55                1.53
    % of verbs – infinitive mood                      28                36                        19.11        27.48            25.03               25.75
    % of verbs – gerundive mood                       37                45                         5.54         6.06             6.51                6.73
    % of verbs – indicative mood                      38                58                        10.46        14.76            11.74               12.91
    % of verbs – third person singular                20                15                          8.2        18.76            14.92                19.3
    % of verbs – third person plural                  80                91                         6.14        10.83             8.04                7.67
    % of verbs – imperfect tense                      78                35                         7.18         1.55             9.72               13.75
                                                                    Syntactic features:
    % of dependency types – auxiliary                 24                 25                        6.65         3.98             4.88                4.41
    % of dependency types – object                    44                 59                        4.22          4.7             5.06                 5.6
    % of dependency types – preposition               55                 81                       15.15        17.33             16.6               16.09
    % of dependency types – subordinate clause        60                 62                        0.99         0.78             1.03                1.22
    % of dependency types – subject                   46                 83                        4.62         3.62             3.77                3.74
    Avg number of verbal heads                         2                 3                        52.89        89.71            99.94              147.94
    Avg number of embedded complement                  4                 4                         9.72         12.8            10.78               10.69
    chains
    Length of ‘chains’ of embedded subordinate        19                  21                       0.48          0.69            0.86                 0.95
    clauses (avg)
    Maximum length of dependency links (avg)          16                  19                      10.26        12.71            14.16                14.8
    Parse tree depth (avg)                            21                  24                       7.86         9.73             9.56                9.65
    Arity of verbal predicates (avg)                  13                  13                       3.62         4.46             4.89                4.74
    % of pre-verbal objects                           52                  42                       4.84         9.71             7.59                4.81
    % of post-verbal subject                          86                  84                      10.65        11.17            10.64               17.07
    % of subordinate clauses in post-verbal po-       23                  16                      52.21        76.57            78.97               97.71
    sition


Table 3: Feature ranking position characterizing i) reflective vs. non reflective texts and ii) different
types of reflective texts and average value of feature distribution in the different types of reflective texts.
Ranking positions with p <0.001 are marked in italics and with p <0.05 in boldface.


one. On the contrary, the model relying on very                                           Features                       F1 0       F1 1     Tot F1
                                                                                          Raw text                       58.4      69.86      64.13
simple types of features (raw text features) that                                         Lexical                       78.58      77.53      78.05
capture how much teachers have written achieves                                           Morpho-syntactic              74.87      75.18      75.02
the worst results. We also carried out a very pre-                                        All features                  79.31      79.01      79.16
                                                                                          Baseline (unigrams)           75.16      74.84      75.00
liminary experiment to classify the three different
types of reflective writings but it produced unsat-                              Table 4: Classification of reflective vs. non reflec-
isfactory results due to the unbalanced distribution                             tive writings using different models of features.
of answers in the reflective classes. As expected, a
balanced experiment yielded very low accuracies
since we used very few data.                                                     the corpus with new manually annotated data to
                                                                                 improve the accuracy of the automatic classifica-
5      Conclusions and current developments                                      tion of different types of reflectivity.
We reported first results of a on-going study de-
voted to reconstruct the linguistic profile of a
corpus of reflective writings by Italian newly re-                               References
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  Feature                                                 Ranking position               Avg. Feature Value in different types of (non)reflective texts
                                                Reflectivity   Types of Reflectivity    No reflection   Rhetoric      Reflection     Radical reflection
                                                                   Raw text features:
  Avg sentence length                               10                 11                      27.97         35.9           38.6                  38.2
  Avg number of sentences                           9                   7                       1.88          2.6           2.81                  4.14
  Avg number of tokens                              1                   1                      52.89        89.71          99.94                147.94
                                                                   Lexical features:
  Type/token ratio (first 100 lemma)                8                   9                       0.78         0.71            0.7                  0.69
  Type/token ratio (first 200 lemma)                6                   6                       0.77         0.68           0.67                  0.64
  % of “Fundamental words” of BIV                   62                 86                      74.15        75.57          77.01                 77.92
  % of “High usage words” of BIV                    92                 38                      19.35        15.79          15.71                 14.92
  % of “High availability words” of BIV             58                 68                       9.72         12.8          10.78                 10.69
                                                              Morpho–syntactic features:
  Lexical density                                   64                96                        0.54         0.55           0.55                  0.56
  % of adjectives                                   71                87                        7.29         9.16           7.72                  7.93
  % of possessive adjectives                        67                43                        1.08            2           0.97                  0.93
  % of adverbs                                      42                46                        3.95         3.93           4.82                  5.29
  % of negative adverbs                             54                53                        0.64         0.38           0.64                  0.65
  % of determiners                                  63                88                        1.19         1.19           1.28                  1.43
  % of demonstrative determiners                    35                30                        0.35         0.66           0.42                   0.6
  % of indefinite determiners                       74                71                         0.8         0.47           0.83                   0.8
  % of prepositions                                 51                82                       15.11        17.08          16.61                 16.05
  % of articles                                     93               none                       9.36         8.34           8.38                  8.64
  % of demonstrative pronouns                       36                34                        0.43         0.65           0.58                  0.78
  % of personal pronouns                            89                99                        0.29         0.39           0.32                  0.24
  % of relative pronouns                            39                56                        1.17         1.16           1.48                  1.55
  % of determinative articles                       30                41                        8.29         6.89           6.81                  7.07
  % of subordinative conjunctions                   69                63                        0.94         0.68           0.98                  1.27
  % of single commas or hyphens                     27                33                        3.55          4.7           4.67                  5.26
  % of numbers                                      87                67                        0.22         0.19            0.4                  0.29
  % of sentence boundary punctuation                12                12                        4.17         2.99           2.86                  2.92
  % of verbs                                        48                70                       20.51        17.71          18.52                 17.91
  % of auxiliary verbs                              25                27                        6.66         4.01           4.92                  4.48
  % of modal verbs                                  40                40                        0.69         1.06           0.78                  0.97
  % of verbs – subjective mood                      72                39                        1.16         1.29           2.55                  1.53
  % of verbs – infinitive mood                      28                36                       19.11        27.48          25.03                 25.75
  % of verbs – gerundive mood                       37                45                        5.54         6.06           6.51                  6.73
  % of verbs – indicative mood                      38                58                       10.46        14.76          11.74                 12.91
  % of verbs – third person singular                20                15                         8.2        18.76          14.92                  19.3
  % of verbs – third person plural                  80                91                        6.14        10.83           8.04                  7.67
  % of verbs – imperfect tense                      78                35                        7.18         1.55           9.72                 13.75
                                                                  Syntactic features:
  % of syntactic roots                              14                 14                       4.57         3.06           3.36                  3.21
  % of dep–auxiliary                                24                 25                       6.65         3.98           4.88                  4.41
  % of dep–nominal/clausal argument                 61                 98                       2.36         3.08            2.8                  2.41
  % of dep–indirect complement                      66                 61                       0.46         0.62            0.5                  0.48
  % of dep–locative complement                      47                 31                       0.07         0.21           0.34                  0.14
  % of dep–temporal complement                      41                 28                       0.16          0.3           0.28                  0.41
  % of dep–nominal/clausal modifier                 45                 73                      15.88        17.25          17.07                  17.7
  % of dep–relative modifier                        32                 32                       1.18          1.1           1.46                   1.8
  % of dep–object                                   44                 59                       4.22          4.7           5.06                   5.6
  % of dep–preposition                              55                 81                      15.15        17.33           16.6                 16.09
  % of dep–subordinate clause                       60                 62                       0.99         0.78           1.03                  1.22
  % of dep–subject                                  46                 83                       4.62         3.62           3.77                  3.74
  Avg number of verbal heads                         2                 3                       52.89        89.71          99.94                147.94
  Avg number of embedded complement                  4                 4                        9.72         12.8          10.78                 10.69
  chains
  Length of ‘chains’ of embedded subordinate        19                  21                      0.48          0.69          0.86                  0.95
  clauses (avg)
  Length of dependency links (avg)                  15                  18                      2.09          2.3            2.4                  2.42
  Maximum length of dependency links (avg)          16                  19                     10.26        12.71          14.16                  14.8
  Parse tree depth (avg)                            21                  24                      7.86         9.73           9.56                  9.65
  Arity of verbal predicates (avg)                  13                  13                      3.62         4.46           4.89                  4.74
  % of verbal roots                                 57                  29                      0.96         0.95            0.9                  0.84
  % of verbal roots with explicit subj              70                  65                     67.92        73.76          59.05                 60.79
  % of finite complement clauses                    83                  95                     19.85        17.19          23.08                 27.64
  % of infinite complement clauses
  % of pre-verbal objects                           52                  42                      4.84         9.71           7.59                  4.81
  % of post-verbal subject                          86                  84                     10.65        11.17          10.64                 17.07
  % of subordinate clauses in post-verbal po-       23                  16                     52.21        76.57          78.97                 97.71
  sition


Table 5: Appendix A: Full list of feature ranking positions characterizing i) reflective vs. non reflective
texts and ii) different types of reflective texts and average value of feature distribution in the different
types of reflective texts. Ranking positions with p <0.001 are marked in italics and with p <0.05 in
boldface. Features which were not selected during ranking have no rank.