Paper

What Code-Switching Strategies are Effective in Dialogue Systems?

Authors
  • Emily Ahn (University of Washington)
  • Cecilia Jimenez (University of Pittsburgh)
  • Yulia Tsvetkov (Carnegie Mellon University)
  • Alan Black (Carnegie Mellon University)

Abstract

Since most people in the world today are multilingual, code-switching is ubiquitous in spoken and written interactions. Paving the way for future adaptive, multilingual conversational agents, we incorporate linguistically-motivated strategies of code-switching into a rule-based goal-oriented dialogue system. We collect and release CommonAmigos, a corpus of 587 human-computer text conversations between our dialogue system and human users in mixed Spanish and English. From this new corpus, we analyze the amount of elicited code-switching, preferred patterns of user code-switching, and the impact of user demographics on code-switching. Based on these exploratory findings, we give recommendations for future effective code-switching dialogue systems, highlighting user\'s language proficiency and gender as critical considerations.

Keywords: code-switching, dialogue, bilingualism, entrainment, crowdsourcing, human-computer interaction

How to Cite:

Ahn, E., Jimenez, C., Tsvetkov, Y. & Black, A., (2020) “What Code-Switching Strategies are Effective in Dialogue Systems?”, Society for Computation in Linguistics 3(1), 308-318. doi: https://doi.org/10.7275/cv36-2c04

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Published on
01 Jan 2020