Hierarchical Character-Word Models for Language Identification

Social media messages' brevity and unconventional spelling pose a challenge to language identification. We introduce a hierarchical model that learns character and contextualized word-level representations for language identification. Our method performs well against strong base- lines, and can also reveal code-switching

Predicting executive functions in bilinguals using ecologically valid measures of code-switching behavior

One of the factors claimed to impact on executive functions in bilinguals is code-switching. New insights into how exactly code-switching affects executive functions can be obtained if attention is paid to the kind of code-switching bilinguals engage in, and not just the frequency of code-switching. This raises the question how code-switching habits can be assessed in experimental research. This study presents two ecologically valid, yet efficient, methods of assessing code-switching habits: a frequency judgement task based on authentic stimuli, and a bilingual email production task. The two tasks converged in revealing differences in Dense code-switching in two groups of German-English bilinguals. Moreover, the frequency judgement task predicted code-switching frequency in the ecologically more valid email production task. Importantly, both tasks revealed code-switching patterns that explained group differences observed in executive performance. The bilinguals engaging in frequent Dense code-switching excelled at the aspect of executive functions (conflict-monitoring) predicted to be related to code-switching based on existing processing models. Hence, both methods are recommended for use as code-switching measurements in bilingualism research

Triggered codeswitching : Lexical processing and conversational dynamics

Acknowledgements. This research was supported by a Small Research Grant from the British Academy awarded to the first and second authors. Writing was supported by a Vidi grant from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), awarded to the first author. We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and the Bangor Bilingualism Centre. We also want to express our gratitude to our reviewers, whose insightful comments and creative suggestions have greatly contributed to the improvement of this paper; we have enjoyed the exchangePeer reviewedPublisher PD

Code-Switching in Linguistics: A Position Paper

This paper provides a critical review of the state of the art in code-switching research being conducted in linguistics. Three issues of theoretical and practical importance are explored: (a) code-switching vs. borrowing; (b) grammaticality; and (c) variability vs. uniformity, and I take a position on all three issues. Regarding switching vs. borrowing, I argue that not all lone other-language items are borrowings once more subtle measures of integration are used. I defend the use of empirical data to compare competing theoretical frameworks of grammaticality, and I exemplify quantitative research on variability in code-switching, showing that it also reveals uniformity and the possible influence of community norms. I conclude that more research is needed on a range of bilingual communities in order to determine the relative contribution of individual factors, processing and community norms to the variability and uniformity of code-switching.</jats:p

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