Innocent Ndubuisi-Obi


2019

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Wetin dey with these comments? Modeling Sociolinguistic Factors Affecting Code-switching Behavior in Nigerian Online Discussions
Innocent Ndubuisi-Obi | Sayan Ghosh | David Jurgens
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

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.