Can code-switching improve the user experience with a dialogue system app for recording endangered languages?

Jacqueline Brixey, David Traum


Abstract
This paper investigates whether a multilingual spoken dialogue system can be used to help collect and preserve endangered language data. In this work, we extend DAPEL (Dialogue APp for Endangered Languages), which is designed to help preserve any language. Our focus, for testing purposes, is on the American Indigenous language Choctaw. The system uses English as a common language, and we test whether incorporating code-switching—the act of alternating between languages—enhances the user experience and/or increases the amount of recorded language data. Our results indicate that users have a positive response to interacting in both languages with the system, that the system plays a meaningful role in language documentation, and, notably, that participants who speak Choctaw as their first language are more receptive to a code-switching system than to a monolingual English-based system.
Anthology ID:
2026.iwsds-1.37
Volume:
Proceedings of the 16th International Workshop on Spoken Dialogue System Technology
Month:
February
Year:
2026
Address:
Trento, Italy
Editors:
Giuseppe Riccardi, Seyed Mahed Mousavi, Maria Ines Torres, Koichiro Yoshino, Zoraida Callejas, Shammur Absar Chowdhury, Yun-Nung Chen, Frederic Bechet, Joakim Gustafson, Géraldine Damnati, Alex Papangelis, Luis Fernando D’Haro, John Mendonça, Raffaella Bernardi, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Giuseppe "Pino" Di Fabbrizio, Tatsuya Kawahara, Firoj Alam, Gokhan Tur, Michael Johnston
Venue:
IWSDS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
369–378
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.iwsds-1.37/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jacqueline Brixey and David Traum. 2026. Can code-switching improve the user experience with a dialogue system app for recording endangered languages?. In Proceedings of the 16th International Workshop on Spoken Dialogue System Technology, pages 369–378, Trento, Italy. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Can code-switching improve the user experience with a dialogue system app for recording endangered languages? (Brixey & Traum, IWSDS 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.iwsds-1.37.pdf