Code-Switched Text Synthesis in Unseen Language Pairs

I-Hung Hsu, Avik Ray, Shubham Garg, Nanyun Peng, Jing Huang

Findings: Multilingualism and Cross-Lingual NLP Findings Paper

Session 7: Multilingualism and Cross-Lingual NLP (Virtual Poster)
Conference Room: Pier 7&8
Conference Time: July 12, 11:00-12:30 (EDT) (America/Toronto)
Global Time: July 12, Session 7 (15:00-16:30 UTC)
Spotlight Session: Spotlight - Metropolitan West (Spotlight)
Conference Room: Metropolitan West
Conference Time: July 10, 19:00-21:00 (EDT) (America/Toronto)
Global Time: July 10, Spotlight Session (23:00-01:00 UTC)
Keywords: code-switching
TLDR: Existing efforts on text synthesis for code-switching mostly require training on code-switched texts in the target language pairs, limiting the deployment of the models to cases lacking code-switched data. In this work, we study the problem of synthesizing code-switched texts for language pairs abse...
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Abstract: Existing efforts on text synthesis for code-switching mostly require training on code-switched texts in the target language pairs, limiting the deployment of the models to cases lacking code-switched data. In this work, we study the problem of synthesizing code-switched texts for language pairs absent from the training data. We introduce GLOSS, a model built on top of a pre-trained multilingual machine translation model (PMMTM) with an additional code-switching module. This module, either an adapter or extra prefixes, learns code-switching patterns from code-switched data during training, while the primary component of GLOSS, i.e., the PMMTM, is frozen. The design of only adjusting the code-switching module prevents our model from overfitting to the constrained training data for code-switching. Hence, GLOSS exhibits the ability to generalize and synthesize code-switched texts across a broader spectrum of language pairs. Additionally, we develop a self-training algorithm on target language pairs further to enhance the reliability of GLOSS. Automatic evaluations on four language pairs show that GLOSS achieves at least 55\% relative BLEU and METEOR scores improvements compared to strong baselines. Human evaluations on two language pairs further validate the success of GLOSS.