Harnessing Code Switching to Transcend the Linguistic Barrier
This addresses the problem of accessing low-resource language content for social good, such as conflict moderation, but is incremental in applying existing methods to a new scenario.
The paper tackles the challenge of leveraging code-mixed social media content to bridge language barriers, demonstrating that using code-mixed documents as a bridge can retrieve hope speech in Romanized Hindi from an English-only classifier, reducing web moderation efforts with minimal supervision.
Code mixing (or code switching) is a common phenomenon observed in social-media content generated by a linguistically diverse user-base. Studies show that in the Indian sub-continent, a substantial fraction of social media posts exhibit code switching. While the difficulties posed by code mixed documents to further downstream analyses are well-understood, lending visibility to code mixed documents under certain scenarios may have utility that has been previously overlooked. For instance, a document written in a mixture of multiple languages can be partially accessible to a wider audience; this could be particularly useful if a considerable fraction of the audience lacks fluency in one of the component languages. In this paper, we provide a systematic approach to sample code mixed documents leveraging a polyglot embedding based method that requires minimal supervision. In the context of the 2019 India-Pakistan conflict triggered by the Pulwama terror attack, we demonstrate an untapped potential of harnessing code mixing for human well-being: starting from an existing hostility diffusing \emph{hope speech} classifier solely trained on English documents, code mixed documents are utilized as a bridge to retrieve \emph{hope speech} content written in a low-resource but widely used language - Romanized Hindi. Our proposed pipeline requires minimal supervision and holds promise in substantially reducing web moderation efforts.