Word Level Language Identification in English Telugu Code Mixed Data

Abstract

In a multilingual or sociolingual configuration Intra-sentential Code Switching (ICS) or Code Mixing (CM) is frequently observed nowadays. In the world, most of the people know more than one language. CM usage is especially apparent in social media platforms. Moreover, ICS is particularly significant in the context of technology, health, and law where conveying the upcoming developments are difficult in one's native language. In applications like dialog systems, machine translation, semantic parsing, shallow parsing, etc. CM and Code Switching pose serious challenges. To do any further advancement in code-mixed data, the necessary step is Language Identification. In this paper, we present a study of various models - Nave Bayes Classifier, Random Forest Classifier, Conditional Random Field (CRF), and Hidden Markov Model (HMM) for Language Identification in English - Telugu Code Mixed Data. Considering the paucity of resources in code mixed languages, we proposed the CRF model and HMM model for word level language identification. Our best performing system is CRF-based with an f1-score of 0.91.