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Computational Sociolinguistics: A Survey
Language is a social phenomenon and variation is inherent to its social
nature. Recently, there has been a surge of interest within the computational
linguistics (CL) community in the social dimension of language. In this article
we present a survey of the emerging field of "Computational Sociolinguistics"
that reflects this increased interest. We aim to provide a comprehensive
overview of CL research on sociolinguistic themes, featuring topics such as the
relation between language and social identity, language use in social
interaction and multilingual communication. Moreover, we demonstrate the
potential for synergy between the research communities involved, by showing how
the large-scale data-driven methods that are widely used in CL can complement
existing sociolinguistic studies, and how sociolinguistics can inform and
challenge the methods and assumptions employed in CL studies. We hope to convey
the possible benefits of a closer collaboration between the two communities and
conclude with a discussion of open challenges.Comment: To appear in Computational Linguistics. Accepted for publication:
18th February, 201
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What Code-Switching Strategies are Effective in Dialogue Systems?
Since most people in the world today are multilingual, code-switching is ubiquitous in spoken and written interactions. Paving the way for future adaptive, multilingual conversational agents, we incorporate linguistically-motivated strategies of code-switching into a rule-based goal-oriented dialogue system. We collect and release CommonAmigos, a corpus of 587 human-computer text conversations between our dialogue system and human users in mixed Spanish and English. From this new corpus, we analyze the amount of elicited code-switching, preferred patterns of user code-switching, and the impact of user demographics on code-switching. Based on these exploratory findings, we give recommendations for future effective code-switching dialogue systems, highlighting user\u27s language proficiency and gender as critical considerations
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