Multitask deep learning for native language identification

Identifying the native language of a person by their text written in English (L1 identification) plays an important role in such tasks as authorship profiling and identification. With the current proliferation of misinformation in social media, these methods are especially topical. Most studies in this field have focused on the development of supervised classification algorithms, that are trained on a single L1 dataset. Although multiple labeled datasets are available for L1 identification, they contain texts authored by speakers of different languages and do not completely overlap. Current approaches achieve high accuracy on available datasets, but this is attained by training an individua…