Preface

摘要

Welcome to the proceedings of the 4th workshop on Computational Approaches to Linguistic Code Switching (CALCS). Code-switching (CS) is the phenomenon by which multilingual speakers switch back and forth between their common languages in written or spoken communication. CS is pervasive in informal text communications such as news groups, tweets, blogs, and other social media of multilingual communities. Such genres are increasingly being studied as rich sources of social, commercial and political information. Moreover, CS language data is penetrating more traditional formal genres such as newswire in multilingual communities. Apart from the informal genre challenge associated with such data within a single language processing scenario, the CS phenomenon adds another significant layer of complexity to the processing of the data. Efficiently and robustly processing CS data still presents a new frontier for NLP algorithms on all levels. CS accordingly has been garnering more importance and attention both in academic circles, research labs, and industry. Furthermore, the current pandemic and associated guidelines of physical distancing has created a significant spike in online platform usage in an unprecedented manner. The usage is for social connectivity but even more relevant is for information seeking. This increase in social media usage translates to more CS language usage leading to an even more urgent need for processing.