A Portuguese Native Language Identification Dataset
This dataset addresses a gap for researchers in NLP and second language acquisition by providing the first Portuguese resource for identifying native languages from learner writing, though it is incremental as it extends existing NLI work to a new language.
The authors tackled the lack of a Portuguese dataset for Native Language Identification by creating NLI-PT, which includes 1,868 essays from learners with 15 native languages and multiple annotations, and they reported results from the first lexical baseline system for this task.
In this paper we present NLI-PT, the first Portuguese dataset compiled for Native Language Identification (NLI), the task of identifying an author's first language based on their second language writing. The dataset includes 1,868 student essays written by learners of European Portuguese, native speakers of the following L1s: Chinese, English, Spanish, German, Russian, French, Japanese, Italian, Dutch, Tetum, Arabic, Polish, Korean, Romanian, and Swedish. NLI-PT includes the original student text and four different types of annotation: POS, fine-grained POS, constituency parses, and dependency parses. NLI-PT can be used not only in NLI but also in research on several topics in the field of Second Language Acquisition and educational NLP. We discuss possible applications of this dataset and present the results obtained for the first lexical baseline system for Portuguese NLI.