Punctuation as Native Language Interference

Ilia Markov, Vivi Nastase, Carlo Strapparava


Abstract
In this paper, we describe experiments designed to explore and evaluate the impact of punctuation marks on the task of native language identification. Punctuation is specific to each language, and is part of the indicators that overtly represent the manner in which each language organizes and conveys information. Our experiments are organized in various set-ups: the usual multi-class classification for individual languages, also considering classification by language groups, across different proficiency levels, topics and even cross-corpus. The results support our hypothesis that punctuation marks are persistent and robust indicators of the native language of the author, which do not diminish in influence even when a high proficiency level in a non-native language is achieved.
Anthology ID:
C18-1293
Volume:
Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
August
Year:
2018
Address:
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
Editors:
Emily M. Bender, Leon Derczynski, Pierre Isabelle
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3456–3466
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/C18-1293
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ilia Markov, Vivi Nastase, and Carlo Strapparava. 2018. Punctuation as Native Language Interference. In Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 3456–3466, Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Punctuation as Native Language Interference (Markov et al., COLING 2018)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/C18-1293.pdf