Automatic Language Identification represents an important task for improving many real-world applications such as opinion mining and machine translation. In the case of closely-related languages such as regional dialects, this task is often challenging. In this paper, we propose an extensive evaluation of different approaches for the identification of Italian dialects and languages, spanning from classical machine learning models to more complex neural architectures and state-of-the-art pre-trained language models. Surprisingly, shallow machine learning models managed to outperform huge pre-trained language models in this specific task. This work was developed in the context of the Identification of Languages and Dialects of Italy (ITDI) task organised at VarDial 2022 Evaluation Campaign. Our best submission managed to achieve a weighted F1-score of 0.6880, ranking 5th out of 9 final submissions.

The paper describes the work that has been submitted to the 5th workshop on Challenges and Applications of Automated Extraction of socio-political events from text (CASE 2022). The work is associated with Subtask 1 of Shared Task 3 that aims to detect causality in protest news corpus. The authors used different large language models with customized cross-entropy loss functions that exploit annotation information. The experiments showed that bert-based-uncased with refined cross-entropy outperformed the others, achieving a F1 score of 0.8501 on the Causal News Corpus dataset.