Chinese Native Language Identification

We present the first application of Native Language Identification (NLI) to nonEnglish data. Motivated by theories of language transfer, NLI is the task of identifying a writer’s native language (L1) based on their writings in a second language (the L2). An NLI system was applied to Chinese learner texts using topicindependent syntactic models to assess their accuracy. We find that models using part-of-speech tags, context-free grammar production rules and function words are highly effective, achieving a maximum accuracy of 71% . Interestingly, we also find that when applied to equivalent English data, the model performance is almost identical. This finding suggests a systematic pattern of cross-linguistic transfer may exist, where the degree of transfer is independent of the L1 and L2.