Papers › Automatic register identification for the open web using multilingual deep learning
Automatic register identification for the open web using multilingual deep learning
Erik Henriksson, Amanda Myntti, Saara Hellström, Anni Eskelinen, Selcen Erten-Johansson, Veronika Laippala
This article investigates how well deep learning models can identify web registers -- text varieties such as news reports and discussion forums -- across 16 languages. We introduce the Multilingual CORE corpora, which contain 72,504 documents annotated with a hierarchical taxonomy of 25 registers designed to cover the entire open web. Our multilingual models achieve state-of-the-art results (79% F1 score) using multi-label classification. This performance matches or exceeds previous studies that used simpler classification schemes, showing that models can perform well even with a complex register scheme at a massively multilingual scale. However, we observe a consistent performance ceiling around 77-80% F1 score across all models and configurations. When we remove documents with uncertain labels through data pruning, performance increases to over 90% F1, suggesting that this ceiling stems from inherent ambiguity in web registers rather than model limitations. Analysis of hybrid documents -- texts combining multiple registers -- reveals that the main challenge is not in classifying hybrids themselves, but in distinguishing between hybrid and non-hybrid documents. Multilingual models consistently outperform monolingual ones, particularly helping languages with limited training data. While zero-shot performance drops by an average of 7% on unseen languages, this decrease varies substantially between languages (from 3% to 20%), indicating that while registers share many features across languages, they also maintain language-specific characteristics.
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