Token level code-switching detection using wikipedia as a lexical resource

Abstract

We present a novel lexicon-based classification approach for code-switching detection on Twitter. The main aim is to develop a simple lexical look-up classifier based on frequency information retrieved from Wikipedia. We evaluate the classifier using three different language pairs: Spanish-English, Dutch-English, and German-Turkish. The results indicate that our figures for Spanish-English are competitive with current state of the art classifiers, even though the approach is simplistic and based solely on word frequency information.