How Good are Humans at Native Language Identification? A Case Study on Italian L2 writings

Abstract

In this paper we present a pilot study on human performance for the Native Language Identification task. We performed two tests aimed at exploring the human baseline for the task in which test takers had to identify the writers’ L1 relying only on scripts written in Italian by English, French, German and Spanish native speakers. Then, we conducted an error analysis considering the language background of both test takers and text writers.