Measuring interlanguage: Native language identification with L1-influence metrics. Brooke, J. & Hirst, G. In Proceedings, 8th ELRA Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2012) , Istanbul, May, 2012.
abstract   bibtex   
The task of native language (L1) identification suffers from a relative paucity of useful training corpora, and standard within-corpus evaluation is often problematic due to topic bias. In this paper, we introduce a method for L1 identification in second language (L2) texts that relies only on much more plentiful L1 data, rather than the L2 texts that are traditionally used for training. In particular, we do word-by-word translation of large L1 blog corpora to create a mapping to L2 forms that are a possible result of language transfer, and then use that information for unsupervised classification. We show this method is effective in several different learner corpora, with bigram features being particularly useful.
@InProceedings{	  brooke6,
  author	= {Julian Brooke and Graeme Hirst},
  title		= {Measuring interlanguage: Native language identification
		  with L1-influence metrics},
  address	= {Istanbul},
  booktitle	= {Proceedings, 8th ELRA Conference on Language Resources and
		  Evaluation (LREC 2012) },
  year		= {2012},
  month		= {May},
  download	= {http://ftp.cs.toronto.edu/pub/gh/Brooke+Hirst-LREC-2012.pdf}
		  ,
  abstract	= {The task of native language (L1) identification suffers
		  from a relative paucity of useful training corpora, and
		  standard within-corpus evaluation is often problematic due
		  to topic bias. In this paper, we introduce a method for L1
		  identification in second language (L2) texts that relies
		  only on much more plentiful L1 data, rather than the L2
		  texts that are traditionally used for training. In
		  particular, we do word-by-word translation of large L1 blog
		  corpora to create a mapping to L2 forms that are a possible
		  result of language transfer, and then use that information
		  for unsupervised classification. We show this method is
		  effective in several different learner corpora, with bigram
		  features being particularly useful.}
}

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