This paper describes our participation in the SemEval-2020 task Detection of Propaganda Techniques in News Articles. We participate in both subtasks: Span Identification (SI) and Technique Classification (TC). We use a bi-LSTM architecture in the SI subtask and train a complex ensemble model for the TC subtask. Our architectures are built using embeddings from BERT in combination with additional lexical features and extensive label post-processing. Our systems achieve a rank of 8 out of 35 teams in the SI subtask (F1-score: 43.86%) and 8 out of 31 teams in the TC subtask (F1-score: 57.37%).

This paper describes our systems for the VarDial 2018 evaluation campaign. We participated in all language identification tasks, namely, Arabic dialect identification (ADI), German dialect identification (GDI), discriminating between Dutch and Flemish in Subtitles (DFS), and Indo-Aryan Language Identification (ILI). In all of the tasks, we only used textual transcripts (not using audio features for ADI). We submitted system runs based on support vector machine classifiers (SVMs) with bag of character and word n-grams as features, and gated bidirectional recurrent neural networks (RNNs) using units of characters and words. Our SVM models outperformed our RNN models in all tasks, obtaining the first place on the DFS task, third place on the ADI task, and second place on others according to the official rankings. As well as describing the models we used in the shared task participation, we present an analysis of the n-gram features used by the SVM models in each task, and also report additional results (that were run after the official competition deadline) on the GDI surprise dialect track.