# MOROCO: The Moldavian and Romanian Dialectal Corpus

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1901.06543 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.06543/

## Key facts

- Cited by 15 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 19 Jan 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [Improving Zero-shot Cross-lingual Transfer between Closely Related Languages by injecting Character-level Noise](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.06772/) (2021)
- [Distilling the Knowledge of Romanian BERTs Using Multiple Teachers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.12650/) (2021)
- [SaRoCo: Detecting Satire in a Novel Romanian Corpus of News Articles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.06456/) (2021)
- [Fine-Tuning BERT with Character-Level Noise for Zero-Shot Transfer to Dialects and Closely-Related Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17683/) (2023)
- [Clustering Word Embeddings with Self-Organizing Maps. Application on LaRoSeDa -- A Large Romanian Sentiment Data Set](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.04197/) (2021)
- [RoQLlama: A Lightweight Romanian Adapted Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.04269/) (2024)
- [RoDia: A New Dataset for Romanian Dialect Identification from Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.03378/) (2023)
- [Adversarial Capsule Networks for Romanian Satire Detection and Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.07845/) (2023)
- [UnibucKernel: Geolocating Swiss German Jodels Using Ensemble Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09379/) (2021)
- [EENLP: Cross-lingual Eastern European NLP Index](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.02605/) (2021)
- [FreCDo: A Large Corpus for French Cross-Domain Dialect Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07707/) (2022)
- [MuSaRoNews: A Multidomain, Multimodal Satire Dataset from Romanian News Articles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.07826/) (2025)
- [SeLeRoSa: Sentence-Level Romanian Satire Detection Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.00893/) (2025)
- [Every Character Counts: From Vulnerability to Defense in Phishing Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.20589/) (2025)
- [MOSLD-Bench: Multilingual Open-Set Learning and Discovery Benchmark for Text Categorization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.13437/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this work, we introduce the MOldavian and ROmanian Dialectal COrpus (MOROCO), which is freely available for download at https://github.com/butnaruandrei/MOROCO. The corpus contains 33564 samples of text (with over 10 million tokens) collected from the news domain. The samples belong to one of the following six topics: culture, finance, politics, science, sports and tech. The data set is divided into 21719 samples for training, 5921 samples for validation and another 5924 samples for testing. For each sample, we provide corresponding dialectal and category labels. This allows us to perform empirical studies on several classification tasks such as (i) binary discrimination of Moldavian versus Romanian text samples, (ii) intra-dialect multi-class categorization by topic and (iii) cross-dialect multi-class categorization by topic. We perform experiments using a shallow approach based on string kernels, as well as a novel deep approach based on character-level convolutional neural networks containing Squeeze-and-Excitation blocks. We also present and analyze the most discriminative features of our best performing model, before and after named entity removal.