  Motivated by the seemingly high accuracy levels of machine learning models in
Moldavian versus Romanian dialect identification and the increasing research
interest on this topic, we provide a follow-up on the Moldavian versus Romanian
Cross-Dialect Topic Identification (MRC) shared task of the VarDial 2019
Evaluation Campaign. The shared task included two sub-task types: one that
consisted in discriminating between the Moldavian and Romanian dialects and one
that consisted in classifying documents by topic across the two dialects of
Romanian. Participants achieved impressive scores, e.g. the top model for
Moldavian versus Romanian dialect identification obtained a macro F1 score of
0.895. We conduct a subjective evaluation by human annotators, showing that
humans attain much lower accuracy rates compared to machine learning (ML)
models. Hence, it remains unclear why the methods proposed by participants
attain such high accuracy rates. Our goal is to understand (i) why the proposed
methods work so well (by visualizing the discriminative features) and (ii) to
what extent these methods can keep their high accuracy levels, e.g. when we
shorten the text samples to single sentences or when we use tweets at inference
time. A secondary goal of our work is to propose an improved ML model using
ensemble learning. Our experiments show that ML models can accurately identify
the dialects, even at the sentence level and across different domains (news
articles versus tweets). We also analyze the most discriminative features of
the best performing models, providing some explanations behind the decisions
taken by these models. Interestingly, we learn new dialectal patterns
previously unknown to us or to our human annotators. Furthermore, we conduct
experiments showing that the machine learning performance on the MRC shared
task can be improved through an ensemble based on stacking.
