@inproceedings{medvedeva-etal-2017-sparse,
    title = "When Sparse Traditional Models Outperform Dense Neural Networks: the Curious Case of Discriminating between Similar Languages",
    author = "Medvedeva, Maria  and
      Kroon, Martin  and
      Plank, Barbara",
    editor = {Nakov, Preslav  and
      Zampieri, Marcos  and
      Ljube{\v{s}}i{\'c}, Nikola  and
      Tiedemann, J{\"o}rg  and
      Malmasi, Shevin  and
      Ali, Ahmed},
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on {NLP} for Similar Languages, Varieties and Dialects ({V}ar{D}ial)",
    month = apr,
    year = "2017",
    address = "Valencia, Spain",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/W17-1219/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/W17-1219",
    pages = "156--163",
    abstract = "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."
}