Leveraging Open-Source Large Language Models for Native Language Identification

Yee Man Ng, Ilia Markov


Abstract
Native Language Identification (NLI) – the task of identifying the native language (L1) of a person based on their writing in the second language (L2) – has applications in forensics, marketing, and second language acquisition. Historically, conventional machine learning approaches that heavily rely on extensive feature engineering have outperformed transformer-based language models on this task. Recently, closed-source generative large language models (LLMs), e.g., GPT-4, have demonstrated remarkable performance on NLI in a zero-shot setting, including promising results in open-set classification. However, closed-source LLMs have many disadvantages, such as high costs and undisclosed nature of training data. This study explores the potential of using open-source LLMs for NLI. Our results indicate that open-source LLMs do not reach the accuracy levels of closed-source LLMs when used out-of-the-box. However, when fine-tuned on labeled training data, open-source LLMs can achieve performance comparable to that of commercial LLMs.
Anthology ID:
2025.vardial-1.3
Volume:
Proceedings of the 12th Workshop on NLP for Similar Languages, Varieties and Dialects
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Yves Scherrer, Tommi Jauhiainen, Nikola Ljubešić, Preslav Nakov, Jorg Tiedemann, Marcos Zampieri
Venues:
VarDial | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
20–28
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.vardial-1.3/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yee Man Ng and Ilia Markov. 2025. Leveraging Open-Source Large Language Models for Native Language Identification. In Proceedings of the 12th Workshop on NLP for Similar Languages, Varieties and Dialects, pages 20–28, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Leveraging Open-Source Large Language Models for Native Language Identification (Ng & Markov, VarDial 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.vardial-1.3.pdf