Inducing a lexicon of sociolinguistic variables from code-mixed text

Philippa Shoemark, James Kirby, Sharon Goldwater


Abstract
Sociolinguistics is often concerned with how variants of a linguistic item (e.g., nothing vs. nothin’) are used by different groups or in different situations. We introduce the task of inducing lexical variables from code-mixed text: that is, identifying equivalence pairs such as (football, fitba) along with their linguistic code (football→British, fitba→Scottish). We adapt a framework for identifying gender-biased word pairs to this new task, and present results on three different pairs of English dialects, using tweets as the code-mixed text. Our system achieves precision of over 70% for two of these three datasets, and produces useful results even without extensive parameter tuning. Our success in adapting this framework from gender to language variety suggests that it could be used to discover other types of analogous pairs as well.
Anthology ID:
W18-6101
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2018 EMNLP Workshop W-NUT: The 4th Workshop on Noisy User-generated Text
Month:
November
Year:
2018
Address:
Brussels, Belgium
Editors:
Wei Xu, Alan Ritter, Tim Baldwin, Afshin Rahimi
Venue:
WNUT
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1–6
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W18-6101
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W18-6101
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Philippa Shoemark, James Kirby, and Sharon Goldwater. 2018. Inducing a lexicon of sociolinguistic variables from code-mixed text. In Proceedings of the 2018 EMNLP Workshop W-NUT: The 4th Workshop on Noisy User-generated Text, pages 1–6, Brussels, Belgium. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Inducing a lexicon of sociolinguistic variables from code-mixed text (Shoemark et al., WNUT 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W18-6101.pdf
Code
 pjshoemark/lexvarinduction