Bo Blankers


2017

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The Power of Character N-grams in Native Language Identification
Artur Kulmizev | Bo Blankers | Johannes Bjerva | Malvina Nissim | Gertjan van Noord | Barbara Plank | Martijn Wieling
Proceedings of the 12th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications

In this paper, we explore the performance of a linear SVM trained on language independent character features for the NLI Shared Task 2017. Our basic system (GRONINGEN) achieves the best performance (87.56 F1-score) on the evaluation set using only 1-9 character n-grams as features. We compare this against several ensemble and meta-classifiers in order to examine how the linear system fares when combined with other, especially non-linear classifiers. Special emphasis is placed on the topic bias that exists by virtue of the assessment essay prompt distribution.