Code-switching Mediated Sentence-level Semantic Learning

Shuai Zhang, Jiangyan Yi, Jianhua Tao, Feihu Che, Jinyang Wu, Ruibo Fu

Abstract: Code-switching is a linguistic phenomenon in which different languages are used interactively during conversation. It poses significant performance challenges to natural language processing (NLP) tasks due to the often monolingual nature of the underlying system. We focus on sentence-level semantic associations between the different code-switching expressions. And we propose an innovative task-free semantic learning method based on the semantic property. Specifically, there are many different ways of languages switching for a sentence with the same meaning. We refine this into a semantic computational method by designing the loss of semantic invariant constraint during the model optimization. In this work, we conduct thorough experiments on speech recognition, speech translation, and language modeling tasks. The experimental results fully demonstrate that the proposed method can widely improve the performance of code-switching related tasks.