N-gram and Neural Language Models for Discriminating Similar Languages

This paper describes our submission (named clac) to the 2016 Discriminating Similar Languages (DSL) shared task. We participated in the closed Sub-task 1 (Set A) with two separate machine learning techniques. The first approach is a character based Convolution Neural Network with a bidirectional long short term memory (BiLSTM) layer (CLSTM), which achieved an accuracy of 78.45% with minimal tuning. The second approach is a character-based n-gram model. This last approach achieved an accuracy of 88.45% which is close to the accuracy of 89.38% achieved by the best submission, and allowed us to rank #7 overall.