Discriminating between Indo-Aryan Languages Using SVM Ensembles

In this paper we present a system based on SVM ensembles trained on characters and words to discriminate between five similar languages of the Indo-Aryan family: Hindi, Braj Bhasha, Awadhi, Bhojpuri, and Magahi. We investigate the performance of individual features and combine the output of single classifiers to maximize performance. The system competed in the Indo-Aryan Language Identification (ILI) shared task organized within the VarDial Evaluation Campaign 2018. Our best entry in the competition, named ILIdentification, scored 88:95% F1 score and it was ranked 3rd out of 8 teams.