TongueSwitcher: Fine-Grained Identification of German-English Code-Switching

Abstract

This paper contributes to German-English code-switching research. We provide the largest corpus of naturally occurring German-English code-switching, where English is included in German text, and two methods for code-switching identification. The first method is rule-based, using wordlists and morphological processing. We use this method to compile a corpus of 25.6M tweets employing German-English code-switching. In our second method, we continue pretraining of a neural language model on this corpus and classify tokens based on embeddings from this language model. Our systems establish SoTA on our new corpus and an existing German-English code-switching benchmark. In particular, we systematically study code-switching for language-ambiguous words which can only be resolved in context, and morphologically mixed words consisting of both English and German morphemes. We distribute both corpora and systems to the research community.