@inproceedings{lotfi-etal-2020-deep,
    title = "A Deep Generative Approach to Native Language Identification",
    author = "Lotfi, Ehsan  and
      Markov, Ilia  and
      Daelemans, Walter",
    editor = "Scott, Donia  and
      Bel, Nuria  and
      Zong, Chengqing",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics",
    month = dec,
    year = "2020",
    address = "Barcelona, Spain (Online)",
    publisher = "International Committee on Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/jlcl-multiple-ingestion/2020.coling-main.159/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2020.coling-main.159",
    pages = "1778--1783",
    abstract = "Native language identification (NLI) {--} identifying the native language (L1) of a person based on his/her writing in the second language (L2) {--} is useful for a variety of purposes, including marketing, security, and educational applications. From a traditional machine learning perspective,NLI is usually framed as a multi-class classification task, where numerous designed features are combined in order to achieve the state-of-the-art results. We introduce a deep generative language modelling (LM) approach to NLI, which consists in fine-tuning a GPT-2 model separately on texts written by the authors with the same L1, and assigning a label to an unseen text based on the minimum LM loss with respect to one of these fine-tuned GPT-2 models. Our method outperforms traditional machine learning approaches and currently achieves the best results on the benchmark NLI datasets."
}