Predicting author’s native language using abstracts of scholarly papers

Abstract

Predicting author’s attributes is useful for understanding implicit meanings of documents. The target problem of this paper is predicting author’s native language for each document. The authors of this paper used surface-level features of documents for the problem and tried to clarify the practical tendencies of the writing style as word occurrences. They conducted a classification of the abstracts written in English of approximately 85,000 scholarly papers written in English or in Japanese. As a result of the experiment, the accuracy of the binary classification was 0.97, and they found that a number of distinctive phrases used in the classification were related to typical writing styles of Japanese.