Language Patterns and Behaviour of the Peer Supporters in Multilingual Healthcare Conversational Forums

Ishani Mondal, Kalika Bali, Mohit Jain, Monojit Choudhury, Jacki O’Neill, Millicent Ochieng, Kagnoya Awori, Keshet Ronen


Abstract
In this work, we conduct a quantitative linguistic analysis of the language usage patterns of multilingual peer supporters in two health-focused WhatsApp groups in Kenya comprising of youth living with HIV. Even though the language of communication for the group was predominantly English, we observe frequent use of Kiswahili, Sheng and code-mixing among the three languages. We present an analysis of language choice and its accommodation, different functions of code-mixing, and relationship between sentiment and code-mixing. To explore the effectiveness of off-the-shelf Language Technologies (LT) in such situations, we attempt to build a sentiment analyzer for this dataset. Our experiments demonstrate the challenges of developing LT and therefore effective interventions for such forums and languages. We provide recommendations for language resources that should be built to address these challenges.
Anthology ID:
2022.lrec-1.102
Volume:
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
June
Year:
2022
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Frédéric Béchet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Hélène Mazo, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
963–975
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.102
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ishani Mondal, Kalika Bali, Mohit Jain, Monojit Choudhury, Jacki O’Neill, Millicent Ochieng, Kagnoya Awori, and Keshet Ronen. 2022. Language Patterns and Behaviour of the Peer Supporters in Multilingual Healthcare Conversational Forums. In Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 963–975, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
Language Patterns and Behaviour of the Peer Supporters in Multilingual Healthcare Conversational Forums (Mondal et al., LREC 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.102.pdf