Analyzing Code-mixing in Linguistic Corpora Using Kratylos

Raphael Finkel, Daniel Kaufman, Ahmed Shamim

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Code-switching, code-mixing, and, more generally, multilingualism pose technological challenges for language documentation, the sub-discipline of linguistics that deals with the annotation and basic analysis of field recordings and other primary data. We focus here on a case study involving code-mixing in the endangered Koda language, which poses special problems for morphosyntactic analysis. We offer a robust approach to multilingual annotations that involves a combination of the popular open source software FieldWorks Language Explorer (FLEx) with Kratylos, a web-based corpus tool for display and query. Kratylos exposes linguistic data from various formats to powerful regular-expression queries that can exploit tier structure and other aspects of interlinear glossed text. We show how Kratylos can target mixed structures in our FLEx database of Koda that cannot be easily identified within the original FLEx software itself.

Original languageEnglish
Article number3
JournalJournal on Computing and Cultural Heritage
Volume15
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - Feb 2022

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
The programming and field work reported here are supported by NSF DEL Grant #1500753 to Raphael Finkel and Daniel Kaufman. Ahmed Shamim’s field work on Koda was also supported by the Endangered Language Initiative at the CUNY Graduate Center. Authors’ addresses: R. Finkel, Department of Computer Science, University of Kentucky, Lexington Kentucky 40506, USA; email: raphael@cs.uky.edu; D. Kaufman, Department of Linguistics, Queens College, Flushing, NY 11367, USA, and Endangered Language Alliance, 3 West 18th Street, 6th Fl, New York New York 10011, USA; email: dkaufman@qc.cuny.edu; A. Shamim, Department of Asian Studies, University of Texas at Austin, 120 Inner Campus Drive, Austin Texas 78712; email: ahmedshamim@utexas.edu. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from permissions@acm.org. © 2022 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM. 1556-4673/2022/01-ART3 $15.00 https://doi.org/10.1145/3480238

Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM.

Keywords

  • Language archives
  • interlinear glossed texts
  • lexicons
  • linguistics

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Conservation
  • Information Systems
  • Computer Science Applications
  • Computer Graphics and Computer-Aided Design

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