Borrowing or Codeswitching? Annotating for Finer-Grained Distinctions in Language Mixing

Elena Alvarez-Mellado, Constantine Lignos


Abstract
We present a new corpus of Twitter data annotated for codeswitching and borrowing between Spanish and English. The corpus contains 9,500 tweets annotated at the token level with codeswitches, borrowings, and named entities. This corpus differs from prior corpora of codeswitching in that we attempt to clearly define and annotate the boundary between codeswitching and borrowing and do not treat common “internet-speak” (lol, etc.) as codeswitching when used in an otherwise monolingual context. The result is a corpus that enables the study and modeling of Spanish-English borrowing and codeswitching on Twitter in one dataset. We present baseline scores for modeling the labels of this corpus using Transformer-based language models. The annotation itself is released with a CC BY 4.0 license, while the text it applies to is distributed in compliance with the Twitter terms of service.
Anthology ID:
2022.lrec-1.342
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:
3195–3201
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.342
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Elena Alvarez-Mellado and Constantine Lignos. 2022. Borrowing or Codeswitching? Annotating for Finer-Grained Distinctions in Language Mixing. In Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 3195–3201, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
Borrowing or Codeswitching? Annotating for Finer-Grained Distinctions in Language Mixing (Alvarez-Mellado & Lignos, LREC 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.342.pdf
Code
 lirondos/borrowing-or-codeswitching