Experiments in Sentence Language Identification with Groups of Similar Languages

Language identification is a simple problem that becomes much more difficult when its usual assumptions are broken. In this paper we consider the task of classifying short segments of text in closely-related languages for the Discriminating Similar Languages shared task, which is broken into six subtasks, (A) Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian, (B) Indonesian and Malay, (C) Czech and Slovak, (D) Brazilian and European Portuguese, (E) Argentinian and Peninsular Spanish, and (F) American and British English. We consider a number of different methods to boost classification performance, such as feature selection and data filtering, but we ultimately find that a simple naı̈ve Bayes classifier using character and word n-gram features is a strong baseline that is difficult to improve on, achieving an average accuracy of 0.8746 across the six tasks.