@inproceedings{cavalin-etal-2023-understanding,
    title = "Understanding Native Language Identification for {B}razilian Indigenous Languages",
    author = "Cavalin, Paulo  and
      Domingues, Pedro  and
      Nogima, Julio  and
      Pinhanez, Claudio",
    editor = "Mager, Manuel  and
      Ebrahimi, Abteen  and
      Oncevay, Arturo  and
      Rice, Enora  and
      Rijhwani, Shruti  and
      Palmer, Alexis  and
      Kann, Katharina",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Indigenous Languages of the Americas (AmericasNLP)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2023",
    address = "Toronto, Canada",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2023.americasnlp-1.3",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2023.americasnlp-1.3",
    pages = "12--18",
    abstract = "We investigate native language identification (LangID) for Brazilian Indigenous Languages (BILs), using the Bible as training data. Our research extends from previous work, by presenting two analyses on the generalization of Bible-based LangID in non-biblical data. First, with newly collected non-biblical datasets, we show that such a LangID can still provide quite reasonable accuracy in languages for which there are more established writing standards, such as Guarani Mbya and Kaigang, but there can be a quite drastic drop in accuracy depending on the language. Then, we applied the LangID on a large set of texts, about 13M sentences from the Portuguese Wikipedia, towards understanding the difficulty factors may come out of such task in practice. The main outcome is that the lack of handling other American indigenous languages can affect considerably the precision for BILs, suggesting the need of a joint effort with related languages from the Americas.",
}

We investigate native language identification (LangID) for Brazilian Indigenous Languages (BILs), using the Bible as training data. Our research extends from previous work, by presenting two analyses on the generalization of Bible-based LangID in non-biblical data. First, with newly collected non-biblical datasets, we show that such a LangID can still provide quite reasonable accuracy in languages for which there are more established writing standards, such as Guarani Mbya and Kaigang, but there can be a quite drastic drop in accuracy depending on the language. Then, we applied the LangID on a large set of texts, about 13M sentences from the Portuguese Wikipedia, towards understanding the difficulty factors may come out of such task in practice. The main outcome is that the lack of handling other American indigenous languages can affect considerably the precision for BILs, suggesting the need of a joint effort with related languages from the Americas.
Cavalin, Paulo Domingues, Pedro Nogima, Julio Pinhanez, Claudio
Understanding Native Language Identification for Brazilian Indigenous Languages