Emotion, Code-Switching, and the Limits of AI: My Undergraduate Thesis
In my last year at UNC-Chapel Hill, I wrote an honors thesis that gave me the opportunity to connect my long-held interests in bilingualism, emotion, the structure of language, and good old machine learning. Working with Dr. Lucia Binotti, I set out to explore what happens when someone switches between Spanish and English mid-sentence. At its heart, the project asks: What drives a code-switch when emotions are running high? Is it random? Syntactically motivated? Strategically deployed for effect? I was especially interested in whether speakers tend to favor one language over the other for expressing emotionally charged content, and whether that choice follows any consistent structural patterns. ...