Code-Switching as a Social Act: The Case of Arabic Wikipedia Talk Pages

Michael Yoder, Shruti Rijhwani, Carolyn Rosé, Lori Levin


Abstract
Code-switching has been found to have social motivations in addition to syntactic constraints. In this work, we explore the social effect of code-switching in an online community. We present a task from the Arabic Wikipedia to capture language choice, in this case code-switching between Arabic and other languages, as a predictor of social influence in collaborative editing. We find that code-switching is positively associated with Wikipedia editor success, particularly borrowing technical language on pages with topics less directly related to Arabic-speaking regions.
Anthology ID:
W17-2911
Volume:
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on NLP and Computational Social Science
Month:
August
Year:
2017
Address:
Vancouver, Canada
Editors:
Dirk Hovy, Svitlana Volkova, David Bamman, David Jurgens, Brendan O’Connor, Oren Tsur, A. Seza Doğruöz
Venue:
NLP+CSS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
73–82
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W17-2911
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W17-2911
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Michael Yoder, Shruti Rijhwani, Carolyn Rosé, and Lori Levin. 2017. Code-Switching as a Social Act: The Case of Arabic Wikipedia Talk Pages. In Proceedings of the Second Workshop on NLP and Computational Social Science, pages 73–82, Vancouver, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Code-Switching as a Social Act: The Case of Arabic Wikipedia Talk Pages (Yoder et al., NLP+CSS 2017)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W17-2911.pdf