Using the Deep Learning Techniques for Understanding the nativelikeness of Korean EFL Learners

한국인 영어학습자의 영어 문장은 얼마나 원어민스러운가: 딥러닝 기반 분석

Building upon the state-of-the-art deep learning techniques, the present study classifies the texts written by Korean EFL learners and English native speakers and thereby demonstrates how the two types of texts differ from each other. To this end, the current work makes use of the Yonsei English Learner Corpus (YELC) and Gacheon Learner Corpus (GLC) as the L2 data, and Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) as the L1 data. Utilizing the sentence classification methods, the current work implements a system to differentiate the two types of texts, the accuracy of which is about 94%. This indicates that the deep leaning-based system is capable of identifying the well-formedness and felicities of the texts written by Korean EFL learners. Nonetheless, the system-based judgments do not overlap with human judgments largely because the deep learning model exclusively focuses on sequence of words. The present study provides a further analysis to see how the two types of judgments differ with respect to grammatical errors (e.g., word order, voice, etc.) and felicity errors (e.g., semantic prosody, the position of adverbs, etc.).