PEOPLEArianna Bienati

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Arianna Bienati

PhD Student
Institute for Applied Linguistics

T +39 0471 055 222

arianna.bienati@eurac.edu

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5732-3957

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About

Arianna Bienati is a PhD candidate in Applied Linguistics at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia. In collaboration with Eurac Research, she conducts research on the modeling of linguistic complexity and its practical applications in the educational and professional contexts. Driven by a fascination for quantitative analysis, she utilizes statistical and computational methods within language sciences to make data-driven, evidence-based decisions in language training.

Her research experience includes a three-year research project on textual coherence and cohesion in academic writing as part of the ITACA project team at Eurac Research. She has acquired solid knowledge about the use of manual and automatic annotation tools to extract and analyze linguistic features, advanced quantitative corpus methods and data management including open science strategies.

She trained as an applied linguist at the University of Bologna, where she earned the MA degree (First class Honours) with a dissertation on restandardisation processes in university students' academic writing. Throughout her undergraduate and postgraduate studies, she actively volunteered for national and international projects focused on academic writing, foreign language teaching, and the promotion of multilingualism in schools.

In 2018 and 2020 respectively she visited the University of Amsterdam and the University of Cologne as an Erasmus+ student. Thanks to the extended training and use of English and German as working and study languages, she is highly proficient in both languages, as well as she can count on outstanding interpersonal communication skills in Italian.

To read the latest publications, please visit:

Academia: Arianna Bienati | European Academy of Bolzano/Bozen (EURAC) - Academia.edu
Google Scholar: ‪Arianna Bienati‬ - ‪Google Scholar‬

For an overview of professional experiences, please visit:

LinkedIn: Arianna Bienati | LinkedIn

Scientific Publications

Journal article2025

Categorising speakers’ language background: Theoretical assumptions and methodological challenges for learner corpus research

Lopopolo O, Bienati A, Frey JC, Glaznieks A, Spina S

Aivars Glaznieks, Arianna Bienati, Jennifer-Carmen Frey

Projekt: Lernerkorpusinfrastruktur

In this article, we investigate how speakers can be categorised based on their language background in the field of Learner Corpus Research (LCR). Specifically, we discuss three key aspects: first, the theoretical assumptions and methodological choices made in learner corpus design, second the integration of a holistic perspective for speaker categorisation in LCR and third the consequences that different categorisations might have on study outcomes. Through a comprehensive review of corpora used in the field, we identify the most common terms, definitions and criteria of categorisation used to describe a speaker's language background. Focusing on the most central metadata encoding language backgrounds, the L1 metadata, we inspect different operationalisations made and scrutinise the theoretical assumptions underlying them. Drawing on research on plurilingualism, we propose a holistic view of speaker's language background for Learner Corpus Research, combining various aspects of speaker's language use by methods inspired from the Dominant Language Constellation framework. We apply this methodology to re-evaluate the language categorisation system in LEONIDE, a multilingual corpus of Italian, German and English texts from secondary school students of diverse language backgrounds. We use the same corpus to evaluate the consequences of using different categorisations of the students on the outcome of possible linguistic studies. Despite a generally high overlap between study results across categorisations, we observe that variables combining multiple aspects of the speakers’ language backgrounds seem to explain group differences for more of the linguistic features investigated.

DOI Quelle

DOI: 10.1016/j.rmal.2024.100170

Journal article2025

Phraseology meets information theory: Going beyond the bag-of-words approach in complexity measures

Brasolin P, Bienati A

Arianna Bienati

Projekt: Das Eurac Research-Korpus akademischer Bewerbungsschreiben: Sprachlicher Erfolg von Bewerbungsschreiben in und außerhalb des akademischen Bereichs

This article investigates how phraseological diversity measures behave across two different axes of variation – expertise and order – with the aim of determining their ability to discriminate between different levels of expertise in writing as well as their sensitivity to the orderliness of texts. Through a scoping review of phraseological complexity studies, we identify the conceptualizations and operationalizations underlying the phraseological complexity construct. Phraseological complexity relies on modelling interrelationships between words to account for their complexity not in isolation, but in relationship with co-occurring words. After trying extensions of classical lexical diversity measures (e.g., type-token ratio [TTR]-based), we borrow from information theory the measure of information fluctuation complexity, which is able to model the interrelationships between consecutive tokens via token pair frequencies. Using a controlled simulation setting, we apply these measures to four corpora of Italian spanning the spectrum from more expert to less expert writers, as well as synthetic corpora that represent more orderly and disorderly variants of the same texts. Although TTR-based measures computed on bigrams also capture changes in the text structure, fluctuation complexity is the only measure that exhibits a bell-shaped curve, peaking for original texts and decreasing for either orderly or disorderly variants, thus capturing an intuitive notion of complexity.

DOI Quelle

DOI: 10.22599/jesla.140

Journal article2025

Theoretical Implications of Automated Discourse Parsing in Student Writing

Bienati A, Pascucci M, Frey JC, Palmero Aprosio A

Arianna Bienati, Jennifer-Carmen Frey

Projekt: Textkohärenz in der italienischen Bildungssprache

This article presents a study on annotating explicit discourse relations in Italian student essays, comparing human annotations with outputs from generative large language models and examining their alignment with theoretical models of textuality. We review prior work on automatic discourse relation annotation in Italian, highlighting limitations in language coverage, especially in out-of-domain scenarios and how these have been addressed. Our experiments explore the use of generative models to mitigate the scarcity of domain-specific training data, while assessing their ability to reflect the intended theoretical framework. We evaluate two generative models in detecting connectives and classifying their senses, comparing results to human annotation. For our evaluation sample, we use a string-matching algorithm combined with a rule-based approach to pre-annotate essays with possible connective forms and their senses, based on their presence in the Lexicon of Italian Connectives (LICO). These annotations were manually corrected by two expert annotators, resulting in a publicly available evaluation sample. The study raises significant theoretical questions about the definition of connectives, its relationship to text segmentation and the challenges both human and machines face when annotating discourse relations. Our findings show how computational approaches can shed light on linguistic theories and, vice versa, how linguistic theories can guide the application of computational resources.

DOI Quelle

DOI: 10.17454/IJCOL112.03

Inbook2024

Condizioni di coerenza e procedure di coesione nella scrittura scolastica: Il caso dei connettivi

Zanasi L, Bienati A, Frey J-C, Vettori C

Chiara Vettori, Lorenzo Zanasi, Arianna Bienati

Projekt: Textkohärenz in der italienischen Bildungssprache

In questo contributo si analizzano l’uso e lo sviluppo di determinati dispositivi di coesione nel contesto della scrittura scolastica, sullo sfondo del rapporto che intercorre tra le condizioni di coerenza testuale e le procedure di coesione. I dati raccolti provengono dal progetto ITACA Coerenza nell'ITAliano Accademico, un’indagine dedicata all’analisi e alla valutazione della coerenza testuale nelle produzioni scritte di studenti delle scuole secondarie di secondo grado in Alto Adige. Il tema viene affrontato a partire dalle più importanti riflessioni sulla definizione di coerenza che la linguistica testuale ha maturato in decenni di studi e dibattiti, per poi approdare alla discussione di alcune analisi condotte, nell’ambito della stessa indagine, sull’uso dei connettivi nella scrittura scolastica. I risultati convergono sul fatto che scriventi più esperti ricorrono a un minore uso dei connettivi e, al contempo, si avvalgono di forme connettive più ricercate. Se e come questo correli con il grado di coerenza dei testi sarà oggetto di indagini future.

DOI

DOI: 10.6092/unibo/amsacta/8065

Journal article2024

Sulla definizione di coerenza testuale: dizionari e ricerca a confronto verso un modello operativo per le classi del ciclo superiore

Zanasi L, Bienati A, Vettori C

Chiara Vettori, Lorenzo Zanasi, Arianna Bienati

Projekt: Textkohärenz in der italienischen Bildungssprache

Il termine coerenza, nella sua accezione testuale, è codificato nell’ambito specialistico della linguistica attraverso definizioni che risentono delle oscillazioni innescate di volta in volta dalle varie riflessioni teoriche. Nei comuni repertori lessicografici dell’uso questa eterogeneità, però, non si manifesta e spesso il termine viene designato in modo parziale o generico per i bisogni di docenti o studenti che consultino il lemma. A partire dall’analisi diacronica e sincronica del temine, attraverso l’esemplificazione di alcune risorse lessicografiche (anche specialistiche) e attraverso l’applicazione di modelli teorici, in questo contributo ci proponiamo di evidenziare i significati che possano guidare gli insegnanti di italiano e di altre lingue nell’uso di una definizione di coerenza testuale per la scrittura scolastica.

DOI

DOI: 10.54218/ladinia.48.243-256

Journal article2023

In viaggio verso ITACA: la coerenza testuale come meta della scrittura scolastica. Proposta di una griglia di valutazione

Bienati A, Vettori C, Zanasi L

Chiara Vettori, Lorenzo Zanasi, Arianna Bienati

Projekt: Textkohärenz in der italienischen Bildungssprache

Nelle ricerche sulla didattica della scrittura scolastica, la coerenza e la coesione sono spesso indicate come elementi fondanti della competenza testuale degli apprendenti e la loro corretta realizzazione è altrettanto spesso richiesta dagli insegnanti. Se da un lato la linguistica testuale si è lungamente confrontata con i costrutti di coerenza e coesione e ha elaborato modelli teorici convincenti, dall’altro assai più rare sono le declinazioni di questi paradigmi in scale e griglie operative. In questo contributo verrà presentato il processo di costruzione di una scala di valutazione espressamente dedicata alle proprietà di coerenza e coesione, così come definite nel modello di Basilea. La costruzione della scala è portata avanti nella cornice di un più ampio progetto di ricerca, ITACA - Coerenza nell’ITAliano Accademico, volto all’analisi di testi argomentativi in italiano L1 nella scuola secondaria di II grado.

DOI Quelle

DOI: 10.6092/issn.2704-8128/14830

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Journal article2025

Categorising speakers’ language background: Theoretical assumptions and methodological challenges for learner corpus research

Lopopolo O, Bienati A, Frey JC, Glaznieks A, Spina S

Aivars Glaznieks, Arianna Bienati, Jennifer-Carmen Frey

Projekt: Lernerkorpusinfrastruktur

DOI Quelle

DOI: 10.1016/j.rmal.2024.100170

Arianna Bienati

About

Scientific Publications

Categorising speakers’ language background: Theoretical assumptions and methodological challenges for learner corpus research

Phraseology meets information theory: Going beyond the bag-of-words approach in complexity measures

Theoretical Implications of Automated Discourse Parsing in Student Writing

Condizioni di coerenza e procedure di coesione nella scrittura scolastica: Il caso dei connettivi

Sulla definizione di coerenza testuale: dizionari e ricerca a confronto verso un modello operativo per le classi del ciclo superiore

In viaggio verso ITACA: la coerenza testuale come meta della scrittura scolastica. Proposta di una griglia di valutazione

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Externe Inhalte

Scientific Publications

Categorising speakers’ language background: Theoretical assumptions and methodological challenges for learner corpus research

Phraseology meets information theory: Going beyond the bag-of-words approach in complexity measures

Theoretical Implications of Automated Discourse Parsing in Student Writing

Condizioni di coerenza e procedure di coesione nella scrittura scolastica: Il caso dei connettivi

Sulla definizione di coerenza testuale: dizionari e ricerca a confronto verso un modello operativo per le classi del ciclo superiore

In viaggio verso ITACA: la coerenza testuale come meta della scrittura scolastica. Proposta di una griglia di valutazione