Byte-based Language Identification with Deep Convolutional Networks

We report on our system for the shared task on discriminating between similar languages (DSL 2016). The system uses only byte representations in a deep residual network (ResNet). The system, named ResIdent, is trained only on the data released with the task (closed training). We obtain 84.88% accuracy on subtask A, 68.80% accuracy on subtask B1, and 69.80% accuracy on subtask B2. A large difference in accuracy on development data can be observed with relatively minor changes in our network's architecture and hyperparameters. We therefore expect fine-tuning of these parameters to yield higher accuracies.Comment: 7 pages. Adapted reviewer comments. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1609.0705

The GW/LT3 VarDial 2016 shared task system for dialects and similar languages detection

This paper describes the GW/LT3 contribution to the 2016 VarDial shared task on the identification of similar languages (task 1) and Arabic dialects (task 2). For both tasks, we experimented with Logistic Regression and Neural Network classifiers in isolation. Additionally, we implemented a cascaded classifier that consists of coarse and fine-grained classifiers (task 1) and a classifier ensemble with majority voting for task 2. The submitted systems obtained state-of-the-art performance and ranked first for the evaluation on social media data (test sets B1 and B2 for task 1), with a maximum weighted F1 score of 91.94%

Hierarchical Character-Word Models for Language Identification

Social media messages' brevity and unconventional spelling pose a challenge to language identification. We introduce a hierarchical model that learns character and contextualized word-level representations for language identification. Our method performs well against strong base- lines, and can also reveal code-switching

Phonetic Temporal Neural Model for Language Identification

Deep neural models, particularly the LSTM-RNN model, have shown great potential for language identification (LID). However, the use of phonetic information has been largely overlooked by most existing neural LID methods, although this information has been used very successfully in conventional phonetic LID systems. We present a phonetic temporal neural model for LID, which is an LSTM-RNN LID system that accepts phonetic features produced by a phone-discriminative DNN as the input, rather than raw acoustic features. This new model is similar to traditional phonetic LID methods, but the phonetic knowledge here is much richer: it is at the frame level and involves compacted information of all phones. Our experiments conducted on the Babel database and the AP16-OLR database demonstrate that the temporal phonetic neural approach is very effective, and significantly outperforms existing acoustic neural models. It also outperforms the conventional i-vector approach on short utterances and in noisy conditions.Comment: Submitted to TASL