Discourse-Driven Code-Switching: Analyzing the Role of Content and Communicative Function in Spanish-English Bilingual Speech

Debasmita Bhattacharya, Juan Junco, Divya Tadimeti, Julia Hirschberg


Abstract
Code-switching (CSW) is commonly observed among bilingual speakers, and is motivated by various paralinguistic, syntactic, and morphological aspects of conversation. We build on prior work by asking: how do discourse-level aspects of dialogue – i.e. the content and function of speech – influence patterns of CSW? To answer this, we analyze the named entities and dialogue acts present in a Spanish-English spontaneous speech corpus, and build a predictive model of CSW based on our statistical findings. We show that discourse content and function interact with patterns of CSW to varying degrees, with a stronger influence from function overall. Our work is the first to take a discourse-sensitive approach to understanding the pragmatic and referential cues of bilingual speech and has potential applications in improving the prediction, recognition, and synthesis of code-switched speech that is grounded in authentic aspects of multilingual discourse.
Anthology ID:
2025.emnlp-main.1194
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2025
Address:
Suzhou, China
Editors:
Christos Christodoulopoulos, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Carolyn Rose, Violet Peng
Venue:
EMNLP
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
23415–23430
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.emnlp-main.1194/
DOI:
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Cite (ACL):
Debasmita Bhattacharya, Juan Junco, Divya Tadimeti, and Julia Hirschberg. 2025. Discourse-Driven Code-Switching: Analyzing the Role of Content and Communicative Function in Spanish-English Bilingual Speech. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 23415–23430, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Discourse-Driven Code-Switching: Analyzing the Role of Content and Communicative Function in Spanish-English Bilingual Speech (Bhattacharya et al., EMNLP 2025)
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https://aclanthology.org/2025.emnlp-main.1194.pdf
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