  Identifying the different varieties of the same language is more challenging
than unrelated languages identification. In this paper, we propose an approach
to discriminate language varieties or dialects of Mandarin Chinese for the
Mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macao, Malaysia and Singapore, a.k.a., the
Greater China Region (GCR). When applied to the dialects identification of the
GCR, we find that the commonly used character-level or word-level uni-gram
feature is not very efficient since there exist several specific problems such
as the ambiguity and context-dependent characteristic of words in the dialects
of the GCR. To overcome these challenges, we use not only the general features
like character-level n-gram, but also many new word-level features, including
PMI-based and word alignment-based features. A series of evaluation results on
both the news and open-domain dataset from Wikipedia show the effectiveness of
the proposed approach.
