Style Variation as a Vantage Point for Code-Switching

Code-Switching (CS) is a common phenomenon observed in several bilingual and multilingual communities, thereby attaining prevalence in digital and social media platforms. This increasing prominence demands the need to model CS languages for critical downstream tasks. A major problem in this domain is the dearth of annotated data and a substantial corpora to train large scale neural models. Generating vast amounts of quality text assists several down stream tasks that heavily rely on language modeling such as speech recognition, text-to-speech synthesis etc,. We present a novel vantage point of CS to be style variations between both the participating languages. Our approach does not need any external annotations such as lexical language ids. It mainly relies on easily obtainable monolingual corpora without any parallel alignment and a limited set of naturally CS sentences. We propose a two-stage generative adversarial training approach where the first stage generates competitive negative examples for CS and the second stage generates more realistic CS sentences. We present our experiments on the following pairs of languages: Spanish-English, Mandarin-English, Hindi-English and Arabic-French. We show that the trends in metrics for generated CS move closer to real CS data in each of the above language pairs through the dual stage training process. We believe this viewpoint of CS as style variations opens new perspectives for modeling various tasks in CS text

Are Multilingual Models Effective in Code-Switching?

Multilingual language models have shown decent performance in multilingual and cross-lingual natural language understanding tasks. However, the power of these multilingual models in code-switching tasks has not been fully explored. In this paper, we study the effectiveness of multilingual language models to understand their capability and adaptability to the mixed-language setting by considering the inference speed, performance, and number of parameters to measure their practicality. We conduct experiments in three language pairs on named entity recognition and part-of-speech tagging and compare them with existing methods, such as using bilingual embeddings and multilingual meta-embeddings. Our findings suggest that pre-trained multilingual models do not necessarily guarantee high-quality representations on code-switching, while using meta-embeddings achieves similar results with significantly fewer parameters

El Volumen Louder Por Favor: Code-switching in Task-oriented Semantic Parsing

Being able to parse code-switched (CS) utterances, such as Spanish+English or Hindi+English, is essential to democratize task-oriented semantic parsing systems for certain locales. In this work, we focus on Spanglish (Spanish+English) and release a dataset, CSTOP, containing 5800 CS utterances alongside their semantic parses. We examine the CS generalizability of various Cross-lingual (XL) models and exhibit the advantage of pre-trained XL language models when data for only one language is present. As such, we focus on improving the pre-trained models for the case when only English corpus alongside either zero or a few CS training instances are available. We propose two data augmentation methods for the zero-shot and the few-shot settings: fine-tune using translate-and-align and augment using a generation model followed by match-and-filter. Combining the few-shot setting with the above improvements decreases the initial 30-point accuracy gap between the zero-shot and the full-data settings by two thirds