Abstract: In this paper we present NLI-PT, the first Portuguese dataset compiled for Native Language Identification (NLI), the task of identifying an author's first language based on their second language writing. The dataset includes 1,868 student essays written by learners of European Portuguese, native speakers of the following L1s: Chinese, English, Spanish, German, Russian, French, Japanese, Italian, Dutch, Tetum, Arabic, Polish, Korean, Romanian, and Swedish. NLI-PT includes the original student text and four different types of annotation: POS, fine-grained POS, constituency parses, and dependency parses. NLI-PT can be used not only in NLI but also in research on several topics in the field of Second Language Acquisition and educational NLP. We discuss possible applications of this dataset and present the results obtained for the first lexical baseline system for Portuguese NLI.

Introduction: Several learner corpora have been compiled for English, such as the International Corpus of Learner English BIBREF0 . The importance of such resources has been increasingly recognized across a variety of research areas, from Second Language Acquisition to Natural Language Processing. Recently, we have seen substantial growth in this area and new corpora for languages other than English have appeared. For Romance languages, there are a several corpora and resources for French, Spanish BIBREF1 , and Italian BIBREF2 . Portuguese has also received attention in the compilation of learner corpora. There are two corpora compiled at the School of Arts and Humanities of the University of Lisbon: the corpus Recolha de dados de Aprendizagem do Português Língua Estrangeira (hereafter, Leiria corpus), with 470 texts and 70,500 tokens, and the Learner Corpus of Portuguese as Second/Foreign Language, COPLE2 BIBREF3 , with 1,058 texts and 201,921 tokens. The Corpus de Produções Escritas de Aprendentes de PL2, PEAPL2 compiled at the University of Coimbra, contains 516 texts and 119,381 tokens. Finally, the Corpus de Aquisição de L2, CAL2, compiled at the New University of Lisbon, contains 1,380 texts and 281,301 words, and it includes texts produced by adults and children, as well as a spoken subset. The aforementioned Portuguese learner corpora contain very useful data for research, particularly for Native Language Identification (NLI), a task that has received much attention in recent years. NLI is the task of determining the native language (L1) of an author based on their second language (L2) linguistic productions BIBREF4 . NLI works by identifying language use patterns that are common to groups of speakers of the same native language. This process is underpinned by the presupposition that an author’s L1 disposes them towards certain language production patterns in their L2, as influenced by their mother tongue. A major motivation for NLI is studying second language acquisition. NLI models can enable analysis of inter-L1 linguistic differences, allowing us to study the language learning process and develop L1-specific pedagogical methods and materials. However, there are limitations to using existing Portuguese data for NLI. An important issue is that the different corpora each contain data collected from different L1 backgrounds in varying amounts; they would need to be combined to have sufficient data for an NLI study. Another challenge concerns the annotations as only two of the corpora (PEAPL2 and COPLE2) are linguistically annotated, and this is limited to POS tags. The different data formats used by each corpus presents yet another challenge to their usage. In this paper we present NLI-PT, a dataset collected for Portuguese NLI. The dataset is made freely available for research purposes. With the goal of unifying learner data collected from various sources, listed in Section "Collection methodology" , we applied a methodology which has been previously used for the compilation of language variety corpora BIBREF5 . The data was converted to a unified data format and uniformly annotated at different linguistic levels as described in Section "Preprocessing and annotation of texts" . To the best of our knowledge, NLI-PT is the only Portuguese dataset developed specifically for NLI, this will open avenues for research in this area.

Question: Are the annotations automatic or manually created?
Answer: Automatic