Maria Medvedeva
2017
When Sparse Traditional Models Outperform Dense Neural Networks: the Curious Case of Discriminating between Similar Languages
Maria Medvedeva
|
Martin Kroon
|
Barbara Plank
Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on NLP for Similar Languages, Varieties and Dialects (VarDial)
We present the results of our participation in the VarDial 4 shared task on discriminating closely related languages. Our submission includes simple traditional models using linear support vector machines (SVMs) and a neural network (NN). The main idea was to leverage language group information. We did so with a two-layer approach in the traditional model and a multi-task objective in the neural network case. Our results confirm earlier findings: simple traditional models outperform neural networks consistently for this task, at least given the amount of systems we could examine in the available time. Our two-layer linear SVM ranked 2nd in the shared task.
Search