Conference article

Using shallow syntactic features to measure influences of L1 and proficiency level in EFL writings

Andrea Horbach
Department of Computational Linguistics, Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany

Jonathan Poitz
Department of Computational Linguistics, Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany

Alexis Palmer
Institute for Natural Language Processing, Stuttgart University, Stuttgart, Germany

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Published in: Proceedings of the 4th workshop on NLP for Computer Assisted Language Learning at NODALIDA 2015, Vilnius, 11th May, 2015

Linköping Electronic Conference Proceedings 114:4, p. 21-34

NEALT Proceedings Series 26:4, p. 21-34

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Published: 2015-05-06

ISBN: 978-91-7519-036-5

ISSN: 1650-3686 (print), 1650-3740 (online)

Abstract

This paper proposes a framework for modeling and analyzing differences between texts written by different subgroups of learners of English as a Foreign Language (organized according to native language (L1) and proficiency level). Using frequency vectors of both POS-trigrams and mixed POS and function word trigrams, we compare learner language variants both to each other and to native English, German, and Chinese texts. We introduce the trigram usage factor metric for identifying sequences that are especially characteristic of a particular subgroup of learners. We show that distance between learner English and native English decreases with proficiency. Next we compare the distance between learner English and other native languages. Finally, we show that automatic proficiency classification benefits from using L1-specific classifiers.

Keywords

learner language; shallow syntactic features; proficiency classification

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