All that is English may be Hindi: Enhancing language identification through automatic ranking of likeliness of word borrowing in social media
This work addresses language identification errors in social media, which is incremental as it builds on existing methods for borrowing detection.
The paper tackled the problem of identifying borrowed words in social media to improve language identification, achieving a Spearman correlation of 0.62, more than double the baseline of 0.26, and found that 88% of foreign words should be re-tagged as native.
In this paper, we present a set of computational methods to identify the likeliness of a word being borrowed, based on the signals from social media. In terms of Spearman correlation coefficient values, our methods perform more than two times better (nearly 0.62) in predicting the borrowing likeliness compared to the best performing baseline (nearly 0.26) reported in literature. Based on this likeliness estimate we asked annotators to re-annotate the language tags of foreign words in predominantly native contexts. In 88 percent of cases the annotators felt that the foreign language tag should be replaced by native language tag, thus indicating a huge scope for improvement of automatic language identification systems.