@inproceedings{kroon-etal-2018-simple,
    title = "When Simple n-gram Models Outperform Syntactic Approaches: Discriminating between {D}utch and {F}lemish",
    author = "Kroon, Martin  and
      Medvedeva, Masha  and
      Plank, Barbara",
    editor = {Zampieri, Marcos  and
      Nakov, Preslav  and
      Ljube{\v{s}}i{\'c}, Nikola  and
      Tiedemann, J{\"o}rg  and
      Malmasi, Shervin  and
      Ali, Ahmed},
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on {NLP} for Similar Languages, Varieties and Dialects ({V}ar{D}ial 2018)",
    month = aug,
    year = "2018",
    address = "Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/jlcl-multiple-ingestion/W18-3928/",
    pages = "244--253",
    abstract = "In this paper we present the results of our participation in the Discriminating between Dutch and Flemish in Subtitles VarDial 2018 shared task. We try techniques proven to work well for discriminating between language varieties as well as explore the potential of using syntactic features, i.e. hierarchical syntactic subtrees. We experiment with different combinations of features. Discriminating between these two languages turned out to be a very hard task, not only for a machine: human performance is only around 0.51 F1 score; our best system is still a simple Naive Bayes model with word unigrams and bigrams. The system achieved an F1 score (macro) of 0.62, which ranked us 4th in the shared task."
}