Exploring Syntactic Representations for Native Language Identification

Tree Substitution Grammar rules form a large and expressive class of features capable of representing syntactic and lexical patterns that provide evidence of an author’s native language. However, this class of features can be applied to any general constituent based model of grammar and previous work has done little to explore these options, relying primarily on the common Penn Treebank annotation standard. In this work we contrast the performance of syntactic features for Native Language Indentification using five different formalisms. The use of different formalisms captures complementary information from second language data, and can be used in combination to yield classification performance superior to any formalism taken on its own.