Identifying Tension in Holocaust Survivors’ Interview: Code-switching/Code-mixing as Cues

Abstract

In this study, we thrive on finding out how code-switching and code-mixing (CS/CM) as a linguistic phenomenon could be a sign of tension in Holocaust survivors’ interviews. We first created an interview corpus (a total of 39 interviews) that contains manually annotated CS/CM codes (a total of 802 quotations). We then compared our annotations with the tension places in the corpus. The tensions are identified by a computational tool. We found that most of our annotations were captured in the tension places, and it showed a relatively outstanding performance. The finding implies that CS/CM can be appropriate cues for detecting tension in this communication context. Our CS/CM annotated interview corpus is openly accessible. Aside from annotating and examining CS/CM occurrences, we annotated silence situations in this open corpus. Silence is shown to be an indicator of tension in interpersonal communications. Making this corpus openly accessible, we call for more research endeavors on tension detection.

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