Linguistic Profiling based on General-purpose Features and Native Language Identification

In this paper, we describe our approach to native language identification and discuss the results we submitted as participants to the First NLI Shared Task. By resorting to a wide set of general-purpose features qualifying the lexical and grammatical structure of a text, rather than to ad hoc features specifically selected for the NLI task, we achieved encouraging results, which show that the proposed approach is general-purpose and portable across different tasks, domains and languages.