  In this paper we present the GDI_classification entry to the second German
Dialect Identification (GDI) shared task organized within the scope of the
VarDial Evaluation Campaign 2018. We present a system based on SVM classifier
ensembles trained on characters and words. The system was trained on a
collection of speech transcripts of five Swiss-German dialects provided by the
organizers. The transcripts included in the dataset contained speakers from
Basel, Bern, Lucerne, and Zurich. Our entry in the challenge reached 62.03%
F1-score and was ranked third out of eight teams.
