Detecting Code-Switching between Turkish-English Language Pair

Abstract

Code-switching (usage of different languages within a single conversation context in an alternative manner) is a highly increasing phenomenon in social media and colloquial usage which poses different challenges for natural language processing. This paper introduces the first study for the detection of Turkish-English code-switching and also a small test data collected from social media in order to smooth the way for further studies. The proposed system using character level n-grams and conditional random fields (CRFs) obtains 95.6% micro-averaged F1-score on the introduced test data set.