Anxin Yi
2025
Code-switching in Context: Investigating the Role of Discourse Topic in Bilingual Speech Production
Debasmita Bhattacharya
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Anxin Yi
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Siying Ding
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Julia Hirschberg
Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Discourse, Context and Document-Level Inferences (CODI 2025)
Code-switching (CSW) in speech is motivated by conversational factors across levels of linguistic analysis. While we know much about why speakers code-switch, there remains great scope for exploring how CSW occurs in speech, particularly within the discourse-level linguistic context. We build on prior work by asking: how are patterns of CSW influenced by different conversational contexts spanning Academic, Cultural, Personal, and Professional discourse topics? To answer this, we annotate a Mandarin-English spontaneous speech corpus, and analyze its discourse topics alongside various aspects of CSW production. We show that discourse topics interact significantly with utterance-level CSW, resulting in distinctive patterns of CSW presence, richness, language direction, and syntax that are uniquely associated with different contexts. Our work is the first to take such a context-sensitive approach to studying CSW, contributing to a broader understanding of the discourse topics that motivate speakers to code-switch in diverse ways.