Identifying and Analyzing Different Aspects of English-Hindi Code-Switching in Twitter

Abstract

Code-switching or the juxtaposition of linguistic units from two or more languages in a single utterance, has, in recent times, become very common in text, thanks to social media and other computer mediated forms of communication. In this exploratory study of English-Hindi code-switching on Twitter, we automatically create a large corpus of code-switched tweets and devise techniques to identify the relationship between successive components in a code-switched tweet. More specifically, we identify pragmatic functions such as narrative-evaluative, negative reinforcement, translation or semantically equivalent statements, and so on characterizing the relation between successive components. We analyze the difference/similarity between switching patterns in code-switched and monolingual multi-component tweets. We observe strong dominance of narrative-evaluative (non-opinion to opinion or vice versa) switching in case of both code-switched and monolingual multi-component tweets in around 40% of cases. Polarity switching appears to be a prevalent switching phenomenon (10%) specifically in code-switched tweets (three to four times higher than monolingual multi-component tweets) where preference of expressing negative sentiment in Hindi is approximately twice compared to English. Positive reinforcement appears to be an important pragmatic function for English multi-component tweets, whereas negative reinforcement plays a key role for Devanagari multi-component tweets. Our results also indicate that the extent and nature of code-switching also strongly depend on the topic (sports, politics, etc.) of discussion.