Ensemble methods using multiple classifiers have proven to be among the most successful approaches for the task of Native Language Identification (NLI), achieving the current state of the art. However, a systematic examination of ensemble methods for NLI has yet to be conducted. Additionally, deeper ensemble architectures such as classifier stacking have not been closely evaluated. We present a set of experiments using three ensemble-based models, testing each with multiple configurations and algorithms. This includes a rigorous application of meta-classification models for NLI, achieving state-of-the-art results on several large data sets, evaluated in both intra-corpus and cross-corpus modes.

Human evaluation plays an important role in NLP, often in the form of preference judgments. Although there has been some use of classical non-parametric and bespoke approaches to evaluating these sorts of judgments, there is an entire body of work on this in the context of sensory discrimination testing and the human judgments that are central to it, backed by rigorous statistical theory and freely available software, that NLP can draw on. We investigate one approach, Log-Linear Bradley-Terry models, and apply it to sample NLP data.