Jacobo López
2022
BaSCo: An Annotated Basque-Spanish Code-Switching Corpus for Natural Language Understanding
Maia Aguirre
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Laura García-Sardiña
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Manex Serras
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Ariane Méndez
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Jacobo López
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
The main objective of this work is the elaboration and public release of BaSCo, the first corpus with annotated linguistic resources encompassing Basque-Spanish code-switching. The mixture of Basque and Spanish languages within the same utterance is popularly referred to as Euskañol, a widespread phenomenon among bilingual speakers in the Basque Country. Thus, this corpus has been created to meet the demand of annotated linguistic resources in Euskañol in research areas such as multilingual dialogue systems. The presented resource is the result of translating to Euskañol a compilation of texts in Basque and Spanish that were used for training the Natural Language Understanding (NLU) models of several task-oriented bilingual chatbots. Those chatbots were meant to answer specific questions associated with the administration, fiscal, and transport domains. In addition, they had the transverse potential to answer to greetings, requests for help, and chit-chat questions asked to chatbots. BaSCo is a compendium of 1377 tagged utterances with every sample annotated at three levels: (i) NLU semantic labels, considering intents and entities, (ii) code-switching proportion, and (iii) domain of origin.