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SUMMARY:Relating Native Language Typology to Foreign Language Usage - Yevg
 eni Berzak
DTSTART:20150121T113000Z
DTEND:20150121T123000Z
UID:TALK57033@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Tamara Polajnar
DESCRIPTION:Linguists and psychologists have long been studying cross-ling
 uistic transfer\, the influence of native language properties on linguisti
 c performance in a foreign language. In this work we provide empirical evi
 dence for this process and demonstrate its use for typology learning\, as 
 well as for prediction of native language specific grammatical error distr
 ibutions in English as Second Language (ESL). First\, we show a strong cor
 relation between language similarities derived from structural features in
  ESL texts and equivalent similarities obtained from the typological featu
 res of the native languages. We leverage this finding to recover an approx
 imation of the native language typological similarity structure directly f
 rom ESL text\, and perform prediction of typological features in an unsupe
 rvised fashion with respect to the target languages. Secondly\, we present
  an instantiation of the Contrastive Analysis framework that uses typologi
 cal information to predict native language specific distributions of gramm
 atical errors in ESL. Finally\, we demonstrate that these two tasks can be
  combined in a bootstrapping strategy\, by first inferring typological pro
 perties from automatically extracted morpho-syntactic ESL features\, and i
 n turn\, using those properties for prediction of language specific error 
 distributions in ESL.
LOCATION:FW26\, Computer Laboratory
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