Reconstructing Native Language Typology from Foreign Language Usage
Name
CBMM-Memo-007.pdf
Size
683.75 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
6c09f8812f347968cde94fa608038eb2
Author(s)
Berzak, Yevgeni
Reichart, Roi
Katz, Boris
Date Issued
April 25, 2014
Publisher
Center for Brains, Minds and Machines (CBMM), arXiv
Citation
arXiv:1404.6312v1
Series/Report no.
CBMM Memo Series;007
Abstract
Linguists and psychologists have long been studying cross-linguistic transfer, the influence of native language properties on linguistic performance in a foreign language. In this work we provide empirical evidence for this process in the form of a strong correlation between language similarities derived from structural features in English as Second Language (ESL) texts and equivalent similarities obtained directly from the typological features of the native languages. We leverage this finding to recover native language typological similarity structure directly from ESL text, and perform prediction of typological features in an unsupervised fashion with respect to the target languages. Our method achieves 72.2% accuracy on the typology prediction task, a result that is highly competitive with equivalent methods that rely on typological resources.
Subjects
Language
Computer Language
Linguistics
Visual Intelligence
Terms of Use
Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 United States
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