Understanding Multilingual Communities through Analysis of Code-switching Behaviors in Social Media Discussions

Abstract

Currently, the enormous span of social media usage-while providing valuable resources for linguistic behavior analysis-makes tracking and understanding these multilingual discussions a challenging task. We have undertaken a multidisciplinary comprehensive study of multilingual discussions via the development of specialized data collection techniques that discover and track multilingual users of social media, and their associated discussions, within a defined geographical region. To facilitate automatic discussion analysis of large numbers of discussions we generated a machine learning model based on ground truth data obtained from Amazon Turk. Our approach goes beyond analyzing social media ..