The GW/LT3 VarDial 2016 Shared Task System for Dialects and Similar Languages Detection

TitleThe GW/LT3 VarDial 2016 Shared Task System for Dialects and Similar Languages Detection
Publication TypeConference Paper
Year of Publication2016
AuthorsZirikly, A, Desmet, B, Diab, M
Conference NameThird Workshop on NLP for Similar Languages, Varieties and Dialects (VarDial), COLING 2016
Conference LocationOsaka, Japan
AbstractThis paper describes the GW/LT3 contribution to the 2016 VarDial shared task on the identification of similar languages (task 1) and Arabic dialects (task 2). For both tasks, we experimented with Logistic Regression and Neural Network classifiers in isolation. Additionally, we implemented a cascaded classifier that consists of coarse and fine-grained classifiers (task 1) and a classifier ensemble with majority voting for task 2. The submitted systems obtained state-of-the-art performance and ranked first for the evaluation on social media data (test sets B1 and B2 for task 1), with a maximum weighted F1 score of 91.94%.