Code switching is a natural linguistic phenomenon in which a speaker mixes two or more languages or dialects, or two or more linguistic registers from the same language. Extensive sociolinguistic studies have been dedicated to this widespread and common phenomenon and there has been some prior work in formal linguistics, but to date it has not been considered a problem of interest to the computational linguistics community. However, in this age of globalization and the current explosion in information and web access, more and more spontaneously generated linguistic data from around the world are being made available to the computational research community. Such data abounds with code switching in its different forms, so there is a real need for computational linguists to address code switching as a central research problem.
This exploratory research effort addresses the issues of how to process code switching automatically. It examines the different aspects of code switching, allowing for the creation of better-principled algorithms based on a clear understanding of the phenomenon. The main questions revolve around morphological and syntactic constraints on switching and how these constraints can be modeled computationally. One of the outcomes of this research is the annotation of significant amounts of data exhibiting code switching in different languages, most likely Arabic, Hindi and Spanish. This research aims at initiating a formal study of code switching in a computational framework, which both increases our understanding of the phenomenon, and develops algorithms for processing natural language data that manifests code switching.
