No Arabic abstract
Code-switching is the use of more than one language in the same conversation or utterance. Recently, multilingual contextual embedding models, trained on multiple monolingual corpora, have shown promising results on cross-lingual and multilingual tasks. We present an evaluation benchmark, GLUECoS, for code-switched languages, that spans several NLP tasks in English-Hindi and English-Spanish. Specifically, our evaluation benchmark includes Language Identification from text, POS tagging, Named Entity Recognition, Sentiment Analysis, Question Answering and a new task for code-switching, Natural Language Inference. We present results on all these tasks using cross-lingual word embedding models and multilingual models. In addition, we fine-tune multilingual models on artificially generated code-switched data. Although multilingual models perform significantly better than cross-lingual models, our results show that in most tasks, across both language pairs, multilingual models fine-tuned on code-switched data perform best, showing that multilingual models can be further optimized for code-switching tasks.
Recent trends in NLP research have raised an interest in linguistic code-switching (CS); modern approaches have been proposed to solve a wide range of NLP tasks on multiple language pairs. Unfortunately, these proposed methods are hardly generalizable to different code-switched languages. In addition, it is unclear whether a model architecture is applicable for a different task while still being compatible with the code-switching setting. This is mainly because of the lack of a centralized benchmark and the sparse corpora that researchers employ based on their specific needs and interests. To facilitate research in this direction, we propose a centralized benchmark for Linguistic Code-switching Evaluation (LinCE) that combines ten corpora covering four different code-switched language pairs (i.e., Spanish-English, Nepali-English, Hindi-English, and Modern Standard Arabic-Egyptian Arabic) and four tasks (i.e., language identification, named entity recognition, part-of-speech tagging, and sentiment analysis). As part of the benchmark centralization effort, we provide an online platform at ritual.uh.edu/lince, where researchers can submit their results while comparing with others in real-time. In addition, we provide the scores of different popular models, including LSTM, ELMo, and multilingual BERT so that the NLP community can compare against state-of-the-art systems. LinCE is a continuous effort, and we will expand it with more low-resource languages and tasks.
We live in a world where 60% of the population can speak two or more languages fluently. Members of these communities constantly switch between languages when having a conversation. As automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems are being deployed to the real-world, there is a need for practical systems that can handle multiple languages both within an utterance or across utterances. In this paper, we present an end-to-end ASR system using a transformer-transducer model architecture for code-switched speech recognition. We propose three modifications over the vanilla model in order to handle various aspects of code-switching. First, we introduce two auxiliary loss functions to handle the low-resource scenario of code-switching. Second, we propose a novel mask-based training strategy with language ID information to improve the label encoder training towards intra-sentential code-switching. Finally, we propose a multi-label/multi-audio encoder structure to leverage the vast monolingual speech corpora towards code-switching. We demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed approaches on the SEAME dataset, a public Mandarin-English code-switching corpus, achieving a mixed error rate of 18.5% and 26.3% on test_man and test_sge sets respectively.
Code-switching is the communication phenomenon where speakers switch between different languages during a conversation. With the widespread adoption of conversational agents and chat platforms, code-switching has become an integral part of written conversations in many multi-lingual communities worldwide. This makes it essential to develop techniques for summarizing and understanding these conversations. Towards this objective, we introduce abstractive summarization of Hindi-English code-switched conversations and develop the first code-switched conversation summarization dataset - GupShup, which contains over 6,831 conversations in Hindi-English and their corresponding human-annotated summaries in English and Hindi-English. We present a detailed account of the entire data collection and annotation processes. We analyze the dataset using various code-switching statistics. We train state-of-the-art abstractive summarization models and report their performances using both automated metrics and human evaluation. Our results show that multi-lingual mBART and multi-view seq2seq models obtain the best performances on the new dataset
Recognizing Textual Entailment (RTE) was proposed as a unified evaluation framework to compare semantic understanding of different NLP systems. In this survey paper, we provide an overview of different approaches for evaluating and understanding the reasoning capabilities of NLP systems. We then focus our discussion on RTE by highlighting prominent RTE datasets as well as advances in RTE dataset that focus on specific linguistic phenomena that can be used to evaluate NLP systems on a fine-grained level. We conclude by arguing that when evaluating NLP systems, the community should utilize newly introduced RTE datasets that focus on specific linguistic phenomena.
Reading comprehension is one of the crucial tasks for furthering research in natural language understanding. A lot of diverse reading comprehension datasets have recently been introduced to study various phenomena in natural language, ranging from simple paraphrase matching and entity typing to entity tracking and understanding the implications of the context. Given the availability of many such datasets, comprehensive and reliable evaluation is tedious and time-consuming for researchers working on this problem. We present an evaluation server, ORB, that reports performance on seven diverse reading comprehension datasets, encouraging and facilitating testing a single models capability in understanding a wide variety of reading phenomena. The evaluation server places no restrictions on how models are trained, so it is a suitable test bed for exploring training paradigms and representation learning for general reading facility. As more suitable datasets are released, they will be added to the evaluation server. We also collect and include synthetic augmentations for these datasets, testing how well models can handle out-of-domain questions.