Accurate, Focused Research on Law, Technology and Knowledge Discovery Since 2002

Reconstructing Native Language Typology from Foreign Language Usage

Proceedings of the Eighteenth Conference on Computational Language Learning, pages 21–29,. Baltimore, Maryland USA, June 26-27 2014. c 2014 Association for Computational Linguistics. Reconstructing Native Language Typology from Foreign Language Usage.

Larry Hardesty | MIT News Office, July 23, 2014: “Computer scientists at MIT and Israel’s Technion have discovered an unexpected source of information about the world’s languages: the habits of native speakers of those languages when writing in EnglishThe work could enable computers chewing through relatively accessible documents to approximate data that might take trained linguists months in the field to collect. But that data could in turn lead to better computational tools.

“These [linguistic] features that our system is learning are of course, on one hand, of nice theoretical interest for linguists,” says Boris Katz, a principal research scientist at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and one of the leaders of the new work. “But on the other, they’re beginning to be used more and more often in applications. Everybody’s very interested in building computational tools for world languages, but in order to build them, you need these features. So we may be able to do much more than just learn linguistic features. … These features could be extremely valuable for creating better parsers, better speech-recognizers, better natural-language translators, and so forth.”

In fact, Katz explains, the researchers’ theoretical discovery resulted from their work on a practical application: About a year ago, Katz proposed to one of his students, Yevgeni Berzak, that he try to write an algorithm that could automatically determine the native language of someone writing in English. The hope was to develop grammar-correcting software that could be tailored to a user’s specific linguistic background.”

Sorry, comments are closed for this post.