Robust Native Language Identification through Agentic Decomposition

arXiv:2509.16666v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) often achieve high performance in native language identification (NLI) benchmarks by leveraging superficial contextual clues such as names, locations, and cultural stereotypes, rather than the underlying linguistic patterns indicative of native language (L1) influence. To improve robustness, previous work has instructed LLMs to disregard such clues. In this work, we demonstrate that such a strategy is unreliable and model predictions can be easily altered by misleading hints. To address this problem, we introduce an agentic NLI pipeline inspired by forensic linguistics, where specialized agents accumulate and categorize diverse linguistic evidence before an independent final overall assessment. In this final assessment, a goal-aware coordinating agent synthesizes all evidence to make the NLI prediction. On two benchmark datasets, our approach significantly enhances NLI robustness against misleading contextual clues and performance consistency compared to standard prompting methods.

Abstract:Large language models (LLMs) often achieve high performance in native language identification (NLI) benchmarks by leveraging superficial contextual clues such as names, locations, and cultural stereotypes, rather than the underlying linguistic patterns indicative of native language (L1) influence. To improve robustness, previous work has instructed LLMs to disregard such clues. In this work, we demonstrate that such a strategy is unreliable and model predictions can be easily altered by misleading hints. To address this problem, we introduce an agentic NLI pipeline inspired by forensic linguistics, where specialized agents accumulate and categorize diverse linguistic evidence before an independent final overall assessment. In this final assessment, a goal-aware coordinating agent synthesizes all evidence to make the NLI prediction. On two benchmark datasets, our approach significantly enhances NLI robustness against misleading contextual clues and performance consistency compared to standard prompting methods.

Computation and Language (cs.CL)

arXiv:2509.16666 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2509.16666v2 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2509.16666 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2025), pp. 8398-8414

https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2025.emnlp-main.423 Focus to learn more DOI(s) linking to related resources

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Robust Native Language Identification through Agentic Decomposition

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