Computational Structural Analysis of German-Turkish Code-Switching

• Applicant: Ozlem Cetinoglu El Khoury, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: from 2017 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 392877234

In this project, we aim to analyse Turkish-German code-switching (CS) from a computational perspective. Previous research on Turkish-German CS has looked into sociolinguistic and linguistic aspects, but there has not been computationally-oriented research that would enable systematic and comprehensive structural analysis. Our goals are to develop representations and methods to analyse Turkish-German code-switching, to create resources and computational models based on them, and to provide input to other research areas via these analyses. To achieve these goals, we will build tools for core natural language processing (NLP) tasks--namely normalisation, language identification, POS tagging, morphological analysis, and parsing--and test them on CS corpora we create ourselves from conversations and social media. We will employ data-driven approaches that give us the opportunity to apply our tools to other language pairs, and to gain insights into computational approaches to CS in general. The structural analyses will also support linguistic research and NLP oriented downstream tasks.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants