The task of automatic dialect classification is typically tackled using traditional machine-learning models with bag-of-words unigram features. We explore two alternative methods for distinguishing dialects across 20 Spanish-speaking countries:(i) Support vector machine and decision tree models were trained on dialectal features tailored to the Spanish dialects, combined with standard unigrams. (ii) A pre-trained BERT model was fine-tuned on the task.Results show that the tailored features generally did not have a positive impact on traditional model performance, but provide a salient way of representing dialects in a content-agnostic manner. The BERT model wins over traditional models but with only a tiny margin, while sacrificing explainability and interpretability.

Evaluating the quality of generated text is difficult, since traditional NLG evaluation metrics, focusing more on surface form than meaning, often fail to assign appropriate scores. This is especially problematic for AMR-to-text evaluation, given the abstract nature of AMR.Our work aims to support the development and improvement of NLG evaluation metrics that focus on meaning by developing a dynamic CheckList for NLG metrics that is interpreted by being organized around meaning-relevant linguistic phenomena. Each test instance consists of a pair of sentences with their AMR graphs and a human-produced textual semantic similarity or relatedness score. Our CheckList facilitates comparative evaluation of metrics and reveals strengths and weaknesses of novel and traditional metrics. We demonstrate the usefulness of CheckList by designing a new metric GraCo that computes lexical cohesion graphs over AMR concepts. Our analysis suggests that GraCo presents an interesting NLG metric worth future investigation and that meaning-oriented NLG metrics can profit from graph-based metric components using AMR.