Transfer Learning Improves French Cross-Domain Dialect Identification: NRC @ VarDial 2022

AbstractWe describe the systems developed by the National Research Council Canada for the French Cross-Domain Dialect Identification shared task at the 2022 VarDial evaluation campaign. We evaluated two different approaches to this task: SVM and probabilistic classifiers exploiting n-grams as features, and trained from scratch on the data provided; and a pre-trained French language model, CamemBERT, that we fine-tuned on the dialect identification task. The latter method turned out to improve the macro-F1 score on the test set from 0.344 to 0.430 (25% increase), which indicates that transfer learning can be helpful for dialect identification.