Linguists and psychologists have long been studying cross-linguistic
transfer, the influence of native language properties on linguistic performance
in a foreign language. In this work we provide empirical evidence for this
process in the form of a strong correlation between language similarities
derived from structural features in English as Second Language (ESL) texts and
equivalent similarities obtained from the typological features of the native
languages. We leverage this finding to recover native language typological
similarity structure directly from ESL text, and perform prediction of
typological features in an unsupervised fashion with respect to the target
languages. Our method achieves 72.2% accuracy on the typology prediction task,
a result that is highly competitive with equivalent methods that rely on
typological resources.

本研究通过英语作为第二语言文本中的结构特征和母语语言的类型学特征之间的相似性，提供了支持语言相似性跨语言转移的实证证据，并利用这一发现，在不依赖类型学资源的情况下，直接从 ESL 文本中恢复母语类型学相似性结构，并以无监督的方式执行对目标语言的类型学特征预测。我们的方法在类型学预测任务上取得了 72.2％的准确度，具有与依赖类型学资源的等效方法相当的竞争力。