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.

We present the results of our participation in the VarDial 4 shared task on discriminating closely related languages. Our submission includes simple traditional models using linear support vector machines (SVMs) and a neural network (NN). The main idea was to leverage language group information. We did so with a two-layer approach in the traditional model and a multi-task objective in the neural network case. Our results confirm earlier findings: simple traditional models outperform neural networks consistently for this task, at least given the amount of systems we could examine in the available time. Our two-layer linear SVM ranked 2nd in the shared task.