EuskañolDS: A Naturally Sourced Corpus for Basque-Spanish Code-Switching
This addresses the problem of limited resources for analyzing and modeling code-switching in Basque-Spanish interactions, which is incremental as it builds on existing corpora.
The paper tackles the lack of data for Basque-Spanish code-switching in NLP by developing a naturally sourced corpus, resulting in the creation of EuskañolDS through identification and manual validation from existing corpora.
Code-switching (CS) remains a significant challenge in Natural Language Processing (NLP), mainly due a lack of relevant data. In the context of the contact between the Basque and Spanish languages in the north of the Iberian Peninsula, CS frequently occurs in both formal and informal spontaneous interactions. However, resources to analyse this phenomenon and support the development and evaluation of models capable of understanding and generating code-switched language for this language pair are almost non-existent. We introduce a first approach to develop a naturally sourced corpus for Basque-Spanish code-switching. Our methodology consists of identifying CS texts from previously available corpora using language identification models, which are then manually validated to obtain a reliable subset of CS instances. We present the properties of our corpus and make it available under the name EuskañolDS.