Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Computational Approaches to Linguistic Code-Switching

Bienvenidos to the proceedings of the fifth edition of the workshop on computational approaches for linguistic code-switching (CALCS-2021)!Code-switching is this very interesting phenomenon where multilingual speakers communicate by moving back and forth between the languages they speak when communicating with other multilingual speakers.Code-switching (CSW) is predominantly used in speech but since it also tends to be more prevalent in casual settings, we can observe CSW in genres like social media platforms where interactions tend to be more casual.However interesting, our current NLP technology is lagging behind in the development of resources and methodologies that can effectively process code-switched language.This is true for even the large multilingual pretrained models such as mBERT and BART.At the same time, the growing adoption of smart devices and automated assistants that rely on speech interfaces, makes it even more pressing that our field addresses CSW language data.This workshop series brings together experts and practitioners that are currently working on different aspects of CSW with a special focus on motivating tighter collaborations between speech and text researchers.We received 18 regular workshop submissions, of which we accepted 13.But this year we also had a special submission type called "Rising Stars".The goal of the Rising Stars is to allow young scientists that have recently published work in the space of CSW to present this work again to a specialized audience.These submissions are non-archival and are intended to increase visibility of CSW research by young researchers.We received two submissions of this type and we hope to continue this new track in future editions.Our workshop also aims to motivate new research and energize the community to take on the challenges posed by CSW data.With this in mind, we hosted a new shared task on machine translation in CSW settings colocated with the workshop.This shared task provided two modalities for participation, supervised and unsupervised.For the supervised mode we asked participants to translate English data into Hinglish (Hindi-English).For the unsupervised setting we provided the following language pairs: Spanish-English (Spanglish) to English, English to Spanglish, Modern Standard Arabic-Egyptian Arabic (MSA-EA) to English and English to MSA-EA.The current leaderboard for the task shows 12 individual public system submissions coming out of 5 different teams.The overview of the shared task and the individual system submissions will be presented at the workshop.The workshop program includes short talks from regular workshop submissions, rising star talks and system description talks.We also have a stellar invited speaker program with talks by Özlem Çetinoglu, Manish Shrivastava and Ngoc Thang Vu.In addition, the one day program will also feature an exciting panel discussing research challenges unique to Machine Translation in CSW environments.