Automatic Identification of Code-Switching Functions in Speech Transcripts

Ritu Belani, Jeffrey Flanigan


Abstract
Code-switching, or switching between languages, occurs for many reasons and has important linguistic, sociological, and cultural implications. Multilingual speakers code-switch for a variety of communicative functions, such as expressing emotions, borrowing terms, making jokes, introducing a new topic, etc. The function of code-switching may be quite useful for the analysis of linguists, cognitive scientists, speech therapists, and others, but is not readily apparent. To remedy this situation, we annotate and release a new dataset of functions of code-switching in Spanish-English. We build the first system (to our knowledge) to automatically identify a wide range of functions for which speakers code-switch in everyday speech, achieving an accuracy of 75% across all functions.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-acl.469
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
7438–7448
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.469
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-acl.469
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ritu Belani and Jeffrey Flanigan. 2023. Automatic Identification of Code-Switching Functions in Speech Transcripts. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023, pages 7438–7448, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Automatic Identification of Code-Switching Functions in Speech Transcripts (Belani & Flanigan, Findings 2023)
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