today in multilingual contexts, many parents prefer to rear their children in the dominant language rather than in their mother tongue. this phenomenon is widespread among native speakers of kalhuri dialect of the kurdish language in the multilingual context of iran, too. nevertheless, some studies have evidenced the privilege of bilinguals in learning an additional language though some others ...

Most second language acquisition research focuses on linguistic structures, and less research has examined the acquisition of sociolinguistic patterns. The current study explored the perceptual classification of regional dialects of American English by native and non-native listeners using a free classification task. Results revealed similar classification strategies for the native and non-nati...

This paper presents our approach to the 2013 Native Language Identification shared task, which is based on machine learning methods that work at the character level. More precisely, we used several string kernels and a kernel based on Local Rank Distance (LRD). Actually, our best system was a kernel combination of string kernel and LRD. While string kernels have been used before in text analysi...

Mother tongue interference is the phenomenon where linguistic systems of a mother tongue are transferred to another language. Although there has been plenty of work on mother tongue interference, very little is known about how strongly it is transferred to another language and about what relation there is across mother tongues. To address these questions, this paper explores and visualizes moth...

This paper describes an effort to perform Native Language Identification (NLI) using machine learning on a large amount of lexical features. The features were collected from sequences and collocations of bare word forms, suffixes and character n-grams amounting to a feature set of several hundred thousand features. These features were used to train a linear Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifi...

During the past few decades, linguists have been striving to investigate language-specific phenomena in addition to their efforts to construct a model of language processing in general. Psycholinguistic studies have been following the same trends by employing a comparative perspective in research on spoken-language processing by human listeners. The aim of this practice is to provide a unified ...

Revealing an anonymous author’s traits from text is a well-researched area. In this paper we aim to identify the native language and language family of a non-native English author, given his/her English writings. We extract features from the text based on prior work, and extend or modify it to construct different feature sets, and use support vector machines for classification. We show that nat...

Ensemble methods using multiple classifiers have proven to be the most successful approach for the task of Native Language Identification (NLI), achieving the current state of the art. However, a systematic examination of ensemble methods for NLI has yet to be conducted. Additionally, deeper ensemble architectures such as classifier stacking have not been closely evaluated. We present a set of ...

Attention mechanism has been used as an ancillary means to help RNN or CNN. However, the Transformer (Vaswani et al., 2017) recently recorded the state-of-theart performance in machine translation with a dramatic reduction in training time by solely using attention. Motivated by the Transformer, Directional Self Attention Network (Shen et al., 2017), a fully attention-based sentence encoder, wa...

Graphical information (such as line graphs, bar charts, etc.) are not readily available for people using mobile devices and for people who are blind or have some other visual impairments. In this paper, we report on both a general-purpose architecture to implement Natural Language Interfaces (NLIs) and an implementation of that architecture, the iGraph system, which allows for description and e...