MOROCO: The Moldavian and Romanian Dialectal Corpus

Andrei Butnaru, Radu Tudor Ionescu


Abstract
In this work, we introduce the MOldavian and ROmanian Dialectal COrpus (MOROCO), which is freely available for download at https://github.com/butnaruandrei/MOROCO. The corpus contains 33564 samples of text (with over 10 million tokens) collected from the news domain. The samples belong to one of the following six topics: culture, finance, politics, science, sports and tech. The data set is divided into 21719 samples for training, 5921 samples for validation and another 5924 samples for testing. For each sample, we provide corresponding dialectal and category labels. This allows us to perform empirical studies on several classification tasks such as (i) binary discrimination of Moldavian versus Romanian text samples, (ii) intra-dialect multi-class categorization by topic and (iii) cross-dialect multi-class categorization by topic. We perform experiments using a shallow approach based on string kernels, as well as a novel deep approach based on character-level convolutional neural networks containing Squeeze-and-Excitation blocks. We also present and analyze the most discriminative features of our best performing model, before and after named entity removal.
Anthology ID:
P19-1068
Volume:
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
July
Year:
2019
Address:
Florence, Italy
Editors:
Anna Korhonen, David Traum, Lluís Màrquez
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
688–698
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/P19-1068
DOI:
10.18653/v1/P19-1068
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Andrei Butnaru and Radu Tudor Ionescu. 2019. MOROCO: The Moldavian and Romanian Dialectal Corpus. In Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 688–698, Florence, Italy. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
MOROCO: The Moldavian and Romanian Dialectal Corpus (Butnaru & Ionescu, ACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/P19-1068.pdf
Code
 butnaruandrei/MOROCO
Data
MOROCO