We introduce a speech corpus containing multilingual code-switching compiled from South African soap operas. The corpus contains English, isiZulu, isiXhosa, Setswana and Sesotho speech, paired into four language-balanced subcorpora containing English-isiZulu, English-isiXhosa, English-Setswana and English-Sesotho. In total, the corpus contains 14.3 hours of annotated and segmented speech. The soap opera speech is typically fast, spontaneous and may express emotion, with a speech rate that is between 1.22 and 1.83 times higher than prompted speech in the same languages. Among the 10343 code-switched utterances in the corpus, 19207 intrasentential language switches are observed. Insertional code-switching with English words is observed to be most frequent. Intraword code-switching, where English words are supplemented with Bantu affixes in an effort to conform to Bantu phonology, is also observed. Most bigrams containing code-switching occur only once, making up between 64% and 92% of such bigrams in each subcorpus.
@InProceedings{VAN DER WESTHUIZEN18.90, author = {Ewald Van der westhuizen and Thomas Niesler}, title = "{A First South African Corpus of Multilingual Code-switched Soap Opera Speech}", booktitle = {Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018)}, year = {2018}, month = {May 7-12, 2018}, address = {Miyazaki, Japan}, editor = {Nicoletta Calzolari (Conference chair) and Khalid Choukri and Christopher Cieri and Thierry Declerck and Sara Goggi and Koiti Hasida and Hitoshi Isahara and Bente Maegaard and Joseph Mariani and Hélène Mazo and Asuncion Moreno and Jan Odijk and Stelios Piperidis and Takenobu Tokunaga}, publisher = {European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}, isbn = {979-10-95546-00-9}, language = {english} }
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