This study investigates the usefulness of the Treebank of Learner English (TLE) when applied to the task of Native Language Identification (NLI). The TLE is effectively a parallel corpus of Standard/ Learner English, as there are two versions; one based on original learner essays, and the other an error-corrected version. We use the corpus to explore how useful a parser trained on ungrammatical relations is compared to a parser trained on grammatical relations, when used as features for a native language classification task. While parsing results are much better when trained on grammatical relations, native language classification is slightly better using a parser trained on the original treebank containing ungrammatical relations.
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Péter Halácsy, András Kornai, and Csaba Oravecz. 2007. Hunpos: an open source trigram tagger. In Proceedings of the 45th annual meeting of the ACL on interactive poster and demonstration sessions, pages 209–212. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Radu Tudor Ionescu, Marius Popescu, and Aoife Cahill. 2014. Can characters reveal your native language? a language-independent approach to native language identification. In Proceedings of the 2014 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), pages 1363–1373. Association for Computational Linguistics.
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Natalia Silveira, Timothy Dozat, Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Samuel Bowman, Miriam Connor, John Bauer, and Christopher D. Manning. 2014. A gold standard dependency corpus for English. In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-2014).
Ben Swanson and Eugene Charniak. 2012. Native language detection with tree substitution grammars. In Proceedings of the 50th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Short Papers-Volume 2, pages 193–197. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Ben Swanson. 2013. Exploring syntactic representations for native language identification. In Proceedings of the Eighth Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications, pages 146–151.
Joel R Tetreault, Daniel Blanchard, Aoife Cahill, and Martin Chodorow. 2012. Native tongues, lost and found: Resources and empirical evaluations in native language identification. In Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 2585–2602.
Sze-Meng Jojo Wong and Mark Dras. 2011. Exploiting parse structures for native language identification. In Proceedings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 1600–1610. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Helen Yannakoudakis, Ted Briscoe, and Ben Medlock. 2011. A new dataset and method for automatically grading ESOL texts. In Proceedings of the 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies-Volume 1, pages 180–189. Association for Computational Linguistics.
