Wetin dey with these comments? Modeling Sociolinguistic Factors Affecting Code-switching Behavior in Nigerian Online Discussions

Innocent Ndubuisi-Obi, Sayan Ghosh, David Jurgens


Abstract
Multilingual individuals code switch between languages as a part of a complex communication process. However, most computational studies have examined only one or a handful of contextual factors predictive of switching. Here, we examine Naija-English code switching in a rich contextual environment to understand the social and topical factors eliciting a switch. We introduce a new corpus of 330K articles and accompanying 389K comments labeled for code switching behavior. In modeling whether a comment will switch, we show that topic-driven variation, tribal affiliation, emotional valence, and audience design all play complementary roles in behavior.
Anthology ID:
P19-1625
Volume:
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
July
Year:
2019
Address:
Florence, Italy
Editors:
Anna Korhonen, David Traum, Lluís Màrquez
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6204–6214
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/P19-1625
DOI:
10.18653/v1/P19-1625
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Innocent Ndubuisi-Obi, Sayan Ghosh, and David Jurgens. 2019. Wetin dey with these comments? Modeling Sociolinguistic Factors Affecting Code-switching Behavior in Nigerian Online Discussions. In Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 6204–6214, Florence, Italy. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Wetin dey with these comments? Modeling Sociolinguistic Factors Affecting Code-switching Behavior in Nigerian Online Discussions (Ndubuisi-Obi et al., ACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/P19-1625.pdf