# Reconstructing Native Language Typology from Foreign Language Usage

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1404.6312 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1404.6312/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 25 Apr 2014.

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [SLABERT Talk Pretty One Day: Modeling Second Language Acquisition with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.19589/) (2023)
- [The Past, Present, and Future of Typological Databases in NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13440/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Linguists and psychologists have long been studying cross-linguistic transfer, the influence of native language properties on linguistic performance in a foreign language. In this work we provide empirical evidence for this process in the form of a strong correlation between language similarities derived from structural features in English as Second Language (ESL) texts and equivalent similarities obtained from the typological features of the native languages. We leverage this finding to recover native language typological similarity structure directly from ESL text, and perform prediction of typological features in an unsupervised fashion with respect to the target languages. Our method achieves 72.2% accuracy on the typology prediction task, a result that is highly competitive with equivalent methods that rely on typological resources.