Are Multilingual Models Effective in Code-Switching?

Genta Indra Winata, Samuel Cahyawijaya, Zihan Liu, Zhaojiang Lin, Andrea Madotto, Pascale Fung


Abstract
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.
Anthology ID:
2021.calcs-1.20
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Computational Approaches to Linguistic Code-Switching
Month:
June
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Thamar Solorio, Shuguang Chen, Alan W. Black, Mona Diab, Sunayana Sitaram, Victor Soto, Emre Yilmaz, Anirudh Srinivasan
Venue:
CALCS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
142–153
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.calcs-1.20
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.calcs-1.20
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Genta Indra Winata, Samuel Cahyawijaya, Zihan Liu, Zhaojiang Lin, Andrea Madotto, and Pascale Fung. 2021. Are Multilingual Models Effective in Code-Switching?. In Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Computational Approaches to Linguistic Code-Switching, pages 142–153, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Are Multilingual Models Effective in Code-Switching? (Winata et al., CALCS 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.calcs-1.20.pdf
Data
LinCE