Unravelling interlanguage facts via explainable machine learning.

Native language identification (NLI) is the task of training (via supervised machine learning) a classifier that guesses the native language of the author of a text. This task has been extensively researched in the last decade, and the performance of NLI systems has steadily improved over the years....

Descripción completa

Detalles Bibliográficos
Publicado en:Digital Scholarship in the Humanities Vol. 38; no. 3; pp. 953 - 978
Autores principales: Berti, Barbara, Esuli, Andrea, Sebastiani, Fabrizio
Formato: Artículo
Publicado: Oxford University Press / USA Sep2023
Materias:
Acceso en línea:Ver este registro en EBSCOhost
fields @attributes:
  recordID: 1
pdfLink:
plink: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=hlh&AN=171389429&site=ehost-live
header:
  @attributes:
    shortDbName: hlh
    uiTerm: 171389429
    longDbName: Humanities International Complete
    uiTag: AN
  controlInfo:
    bkinfo:
    jinfo:
      jid:
        2055768X
        JEO9
      jtl: Digital Scholarship in the Humanities
      issn: 2055768X
      maglogo: N
    pubinfo:
      dt: Sep2023
      vid: 38
      iid: 3
      pid: 622
      pub: Oxford University Press / USA
    artinfo:
      ui:
        171389429
        10.1093/llc/fqad019
      ppf: 953
      ppct: 25
      formats:
        fmt:
          – @attributes:
              type: T
          – @attributes:
              type: P
              size: 807KB
      tig:
        atl: Unravelling interlanguage facts via explainable machine learning.
      aug:
        au:
          Berti, Barbara
          Esuli, Andrea
          Sebastiani, Fabrizio
        affil:
          Dipartimento di Lingue, Letterature, Culture e Mediazioni, Università degli Studi di Milano , Milano, Italy
          Istituto di Scienza e Tecnologie dell'Informazione, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche , Pisa, Italy
      su:
        Machine learning
        Supervised learning
        Native language
        Linguistics
        English language
      sug:
        subj:
          Machine learning
          Supervised learning
          Native language
          Linguistics
          English language
      ab: Native language identification (NLI) is the task of training (via supervised machine learning) a classifier that guesses the native language of the author of a text. This task has been extensively researched in the last decade, and the performance of NLI systems has steadily improved over the years. We focus on a different facet of the NLI task, i.e. that of analysing the internals of an NLI classifier trained by an explainable machine learning (EML) algorithm, in order to obtain explanations of its classification decisions, with the ultimate goal of gaining insight into which linguistic phenomena 'give a speaker's native language away'. We use this perspective in order to tackle both NLI and a (much less researched) companion task, i.e. guessing whether a text has been written by a native or a non-native speaker. Using three datasets of different provenance (two datasets of English learners' essays and a dataset of social media posts), we investigate which kind of linguistic traits (lexical, morphological, syntactic, and statistical) are most effective for solving our two tasks, namely, are most indicative of a speaker's L1; our experiments indicate that the most discriminative features are the lexical ones, followed by the morphological, syntactic, and statistical features, in this order. We also present two case studies, one on Italian and one on Spanish learners of English, in which we analyse individual linguistic traits that the classifiers have singled out as most important for spotting these L1s; we show that the traits identified as most discriminative well align with our intuition, i.e. represent typical patterns of language misuse, underuse, or overuse, by speakers of the given L1. Overall, our study shows that the use of EML can be a valuable tool for the scholar who investigates interlanguage facts and language transfer.
      pubtype: Academic Journal
      doctype: Article
      src: R
    language: English
    refInfo:
    copyright:
      @attributes:
        flag: Y
      custom: © 2019 EADH: The European Association for Digital Humanities.
      item: Digital Scholarship in the Humanities
      holder: Oxford University Press / USA
      dt:
        @attributes:
          year: 2023
    holdings:
      @attributes:
        islocal: N