Simulating Spanish-English Code-Switching: El Modelo Está Generating Code-Switches

Chara Tsoukala, Stefan L. Frank, Antal van den Bosch, Jorge Valdés Kroff, Mirjam Broersma


Abstract
Multilingual speakers are able to switch from one language to the other (“code-switch”) between or within sentences. Because the underlying cognitive mechanisms are not well understood, in this study we use computational cognitive modeling to shed light on the process of code-switching. We employed the Bilingual Dual-path model, a Recurrent Neural Network of bilingual sentence production (Tsoukala et al., 2017), and simulated sentence production in simultaneous Spanish-English bilinguals. Our first goal was to investigate whether the model would code-switch without being exposed to code-switched training input. The model indeed produced code-switches even without any exposure to such input and the patterns of code-switches are in line with earlier linguistic work (Poplack,1980). The second goal of this study was to investigate an auxiliary phrase asymmetry that exists in Spanish-English code-switched production. Using this cognitive model, we examined a possible cause for this asymmetry. To our knowledge, this is the first computational cognitive model that aims to simulate code-switched sentence production.
Anthology ID:
W19-2903
Volume:
Proceedings of the Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics
Month:
June
Year:
2019
Address:
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Editors:
Emmanuele Chersoni, Cassandra Jacobs, Alessandro Lenci, Tal Linzen, Laurent Prévot, Enrico Santus
Venue:
CMCL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
20–29
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W19-2903
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W19-2903
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Chara Tsoukala, Stefan L. Frank, Antal van den Bosch, Jorge Valdés Kroff, and Mirjam Broersma. 2019. Simulating Spanish-English Code-Switching: El Modelo Está Generating Code-Switches. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics, pages 20–29, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Simulating Spanish-English Code-Switching: El Modelo Está Generating Code-Switches (Tsoukala et al., CMCL 2019)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W19-2903.pdf