TY - GEN
T1 - Reconstructing native language typology from foreign language usage
AU - Berzak, Yevgeni
AU - Reichart, Roi
AU - Katz, Boris
N1 - Publisher Copyright: © 2014 Association for Computational Linguistics.
PY - 2014
Y1 - 2014
N2 - 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 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.
AB - 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 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.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85040908549&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - https://doi.org/10.3115/v1/w14-1603
DO - https://doi.org/10.3115/v1/w14-1603
M3 - منشور من مؤتمر
T3 - CoNLL 2014 - 18th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning, Proceedings
SP - 21
EP - 29
BT - CoNLL 2014 - 18th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning, Proceedings
T2 - 18th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning, CoNLL 2014
Y2 - 26 June 2014 through 27 June 2014
ER -