Baby-Steps Towards Building a Spanglish Language Model

Abstract. Spanglish is the simultaneous use, or alternating of both, traditional Spanish and English within the same conversational event. This interlanguage is commonly used in U.S. populations with large percentages of Spanish speakers. Despite the popularity of this dialect, and the wide spread of automated voice systems, currently there are no spoken dialog applications that can process Spanglish. In this paper we present the first attempt towards creating a Spanglish language model. 1 What is Spanglish? Spanglish has existed for a long time, but has not been formally recognized as a language, nor has it been classified as a particular linguistic phenomenon. This interlanguage is more of a continuum of the mix between English and Spanish. From a linguistic point of view, it is difficult to decide what to consider Spanglish. It is debatable whether to consider Spanglish as an interlanguage, a pidgin, or a creole language. An interlanguage is a language that is often spoken between...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: CICLING
• Authors: Juan Carlos Franco, Thamar Solorio
• Keywords: CICLING 2007, Natural Language Processing, Spanglish, Spanglish Language Model, Spanglish Speakers