Improving Native Language Identification by Using Spelling Errors

Lingzhen Chen, Carlo Strapparava, Vivi Nastase

Abstract: In this paper, we explore spelling errors as a source of information for detecting the native language of a writer, a previously under-explored area. We note that character n-grams from misspelled words are very indicative of the native language of the author. In combination with other lexical features, spelling error features lead to 1.2% improvement in accuracy on classifying texts in the TOEFL11 corpus by the author’s native language, compared to systems participating in the NLI shared task.