Code-Switching Patterns Can Be an Effective Route to Improve Performance of Downstream NLP Applications: A Case Study of Humour, Sarcasm and Hate Speech Detection Srijan Bansal1, G Vishal2, Ayush Suhane3, Jasabanta Patro4, Animesh Mukherjee5 Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, West Bengal, India - 721302 f1srijanbansal97, 2vishal g, 3ayushsuhane99
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[email protected] Abstract 1.1 Motivation The primary motivation for the current work is de- In this paper we demonstrate how code- rived from (Vizca´ıno, 2011) where the author notes switching patterns can be utilised to improve – “The switch itself may be the object of humour”. various downstream NLP applications. In par- In fact, (Siegel, 1995) has studied humour in the ticular, we encode different switching features Fijian language and notes that when trying to be to improve humour, sarcasm and hate speech detection tasks. We believe that this simple comical, or convey humour, speakers switch from linguistic observation can also be potentially Fijian to Hindi. Therefore, humour here is pro- helpful in improving other similar NLP appli- duced by the change of code rather than by the cations. referential meaning or content of the message. The paper also talks about similar phenomena observed 1 Introduction in Spanish-English cases. In a study of English-Hindi code-switching and Code-mixing/switching in social media has become swearing patterns on social networks (Agarwal commonplace. Over the past few years, the NLP et al., 2017), the authors show that when people research community has in fact started to vigor- code-switch, there is a strong preference for swear- ously investigate various properties of such code- ing in the dominant language.