@inproceedings{tyagi-etal-2026-modeling,
    title = "Modeling Cultural and Subcultural Variation in Code-Switched Discourse with Topic Annotation",
    author = "Tyagi, Nemika  and
      Licona-Guevara, Nelvin  and
      Kellert, Olga",
    editor = "Prabhakaran, Vinodkumar  and
      Dev, Sunipa  and
      Benotti, Luciana  and
      Hershcovich, Daniel  and
      Cao, Yong  and
      Zhou, Li  and
      Ma, BOlei  and
      Adebara, Ife",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Cross-Cultural Considerations in {NLP} ({C}3{NLP} 2026)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-workshops/2026.c3nlp-1.3/",
    pages = "40--49",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-420-0",
    abstract = "Code-switching is often modeled in NLP as a structural or token-level phenomenon, overlooking its role as a discourse practice shaped by social and cultural context. In this work, we propose topic-based annotation as a framework for analyzing cultural and subcultural variation in bilingual discourse. Using large language models, we annotate 3,691 code-switched sentences from Spanish-English (Miami) and Spanish-Guaran{\'i} (Paraguay) corpora with topic and discourse-level information, integrating sociolinguistic metadata. Our analysis reveals systematic relationships between discourse topics, language choice, and social variables such as gender and language dominance. We observe subcultural variation within the Miami community and a clear diglossic distribution in Paraguay, where Guaran{\'i} is associated with formal domains and Spanish with informal communication. These findings suggest that modeling code-switching through discourse-level categories provides a more complete representation of multilingual communication and enables both cross-cultural and intra-cultural comparison at scale."
}