Euska\~nolDS: A Naturally Sourced Corpus for Basque-Spanish Code-Switching

TL;DR

This paper introduces EuskanolDS, a novel corpus of naturally occurring Basque-Spanish code-switching data, created through a combination of automated identification and manual validation, to support NLP research in this language pair.

Contribution

It presents the first naturally sourced Basque-Spanish code-switching corpus, including methodology for data collection and validation, filling a critical resource gap in NLP research.

Findings

Corpus contains X number of CS instances.

Methodology achieves Y% accuracy in identifying CS texts.

Corpus is publicly available for research use.

Abstract

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 Euska\~nolDS.