In this paper, we present experiments that estimate the impact of specific lexical choices of people writing in a second language (L2). In particular, we look at misspelled words that indicate lexical uncertainty on the part of the author, and separate them into three categories: misspelled cognates, “L2-ed” (in our case, anglicized) words, and all other spelling errors. We test the assumption that such errors contain clues about the native language of an essay’s author through the task of native language identification. The results of the experiments show that the information brought by each of these categories is complementary. We also note that while the distribution of such features changes with the proficiency level of the writer, their contribution towards native language identification remains significant at all levels.

Anglicized words and misspelled cognates in native language identification

Vivi Nastase;Carlo Strapparava
2019-01-01

Abstract

In this paper, we present experiments that estimate the impact of specific lexical choices of people writing in a second language (L2). In particular, we look at misspelled words that indicate lexical uncertainty on the part of the author, and separate them into three categories: misspelled cognates, “L2-ed” (in our case, anglicized) words, and all other spelling errors. We test the assumption that such errors contain clues about the native language of an essay’s author through the task of native language identification. The results of the experiments show that the information brought by each of these categories is complementary. We also note that while the distribution of such features changes with the proficiency level of the writer, their contribution towards native language identification remains significant at all levels.
2019
978-1-950737-34-5
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11582/320220
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