Addressing Code-Switching in French/Algerian Arabic Speech
Résumé
This study focuses on code-switching (CS) in French/Algerian
Arabic bilingual communities and investigates how speech
technologies, such as automatic data partitioning, language
identification and automatic speech recognition (ASR) can
serve to analyze and classify this type of bilingual speech. A
preliminary study carried out using a corpus of Maghrebian
broadcast data revealed a relatively high presence of CS Alge-
rian Arabic as compared to the neighboring countries Morocco
and Tunisia. Therefore this study focuses on code switching
produced by bilingual Algerian speakers who can be considered
native speakers of both Algerian Arabic and French. A specific
corpus of four hours of speech from 8 bilingual French Algerian
speakers was collected. This corpus contains read speech and
conversational speech in both languages and includes stretches
of code-switching. We provide a linguistic description of the
code-switching stretches in terms of intra-sentential and inter-
sentential switches, the speech duration in each language. We
report on some initial studies to locate French, Arabic and the
code-switched stretches, using ASR system word posteriors for
this pair of languages.