Adapting Language Balance in Code-Switching Speech

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Ugan, Enes Yavuz, Pham, Ngoc-Quan, Waibel, Alexander
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Ugan, Enes Yavuz
Pham, Ngoc-Quan
Waibel, Alexander
author_facet Ugan, Enes Yavuz
Pham, Ngoc-Quan
Waibel, Alexander
contents Despite achieving impressive results on standard benchmarks, large foundational models still struggle against code-switching test cases. When data scarcity cannot be used as the usual justification for poor performance, the reason may lie in the infrequent occurrence of code-switched moments, where the embedding of the second language appears subtly. Instead of expecting the models to learn this infrequency on their own, it might be beneficial to provide the training process with labels. Evaluating model performance on code-switching data requires careful localization of code-switching points where recognition errors are most consequential, so that the analysis emphasizes mistakes occurring at those moments. Building on this observation, we leverage the difference between the embedded and the main language to highlight those code-switching points and thereby emphasize learning at those locations. This simple yet effective differentiable surrogate mitigates context bias during generation -- the central challenge in code-switching -- thereby improving the model's robustness. Our experiments with Arabic and Chinese-English showed that the models are able to predict the switching places more correctly, reflected by the reduced substitution error.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_18724
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Adapting Language Balance in Code-Switching Speech
Ugan, Enes Yavuz
Pham, Ngoc-Quan
Waibel, Alexander
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
Sound
Audio and Speech Processing
Despite achieving impressive results on standard benchmarks, large foundational models still struggle against code-switching test cases. When data scarcity cannot be used as the usual justification for poor performance, the reason may lie in the infrequent occurrence of code-switched moments, where the embedding of the second language appears subtly. Instead of expecting the models to learn this infrequency on their own, it might be beneficial to provide the training process with labels. Evaluating model performance on code-switching data requires careful localization of code-switching points where recognition errors are most consequential, so that the analysis emphasizes mistakes occurring at those moments. Building on this observation, we leverage the difference between the embedded and the main language to highlight those code-switching points and thereby emphasize learning at those locations. This simple yet effective differentiable surrogate mitigates context bias during generation -- the central challenge in code-switching -- thereby improving the model's robustness. Our experiments with Arabic and Chinese-English showed that the models are able to predict the switching places more correctly, reflected by the reduced substitution error.
title Adapting Language Balance in Code-Switching Speech
topic Computation and Language
Machine Learning
Sound
Audio and Speech Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18724