@inproceedings{calvillo-etal-2020-surprisal,
    title = "Surprisal Predicts Code-Switching in {C}hinese-{E}nglish Bilingual Text",
    author = "Calvillo, Jes{\'u}s  and
      Fang, Le  and
      Cole, Jeremy  and
      Reitter, David",
    editor = "Webber, Bonnie  and
      Cohn, Trevor  and
      He, Yulan  and
      Liu, Yang",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)",
    month = nov,
    year = "2020",
    address = "Online",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2020.emnlp-main.330/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.330",
    pages = "4029--4039",
    abstract = "Why do bilinguals switch languages within a sentence? The present observational study asks whether word surprisal and word entropy predict code-switching in bilingual written conversation. We describe and model a new dataset of Chinese-English text with 1476 clean code-switched sentences, translated back into Chinese. The model includes known control variables together with word surprisal and word entropy. We found that word surprisal, but not entropy, is a significant predictor that explains code-switching above and beyond other well-known predictors. We also found sentence length to be a significant predictor, which has been related to sentence complexity. We propose high cognitive effort as a reason for code-switching, as it leaves fewer resources for inhibition of the alternative language. We also corroborate previous findings, but this time using a computational model of surprisal, a new language pair, and doing so for written language."
}