Code-Mixed Probes Show How Pre-Trained Models Generalise on Code-Switched Text

Frances Adriana Laureano De Leon, Harish Tayyar Madabushi, Mark Lee


Abstract
Code-switching is a prevalent linguistic phenomenon in which multilingual individuals seamlessly alternate between languages. Despite its widespread use online and recent research trends in this area, research in code-switching presents unique challenges, primarily stemming from the scarcity of labelled data and available resources. In this study we investigate how pre-trained Language Models handle code-switched text in three dimensions: a) the ability of PLMs to detect code-switched text, b) variations in the structural information that PLMs utilise to capture code-switched text, and c) the consistency of semantic information representation in code-switched text. To conduct a systematic and controlled evaluation of the language models in question, we create a novel dataset of well-formed naturalistic code-switched text along with parallel translations into the source languages. Our findings reveal that pre-trained language models are effective in generalising to code-switched text, shedding light on abilities of these models to generalise representations to CS corpora. We release all our code and data, including the novel corpus, at https://github.com/francesita/code-mixed-probes.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.307
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
3457–3468
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.307
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Frances Adriana Laureano De Leon, Harish Tayyar Madabushi, and Mark Lee. 2024. Code-Mixed Probes Show How Pre-Trained Models Generalise on Code-Switched Text. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 3457–3468, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
Code-Mixed Probes Show How Pre-Trained Models Generalise on Code-Switched Text (Laureano De Leon et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/add_acl24_videos/2024.lrec-main.307.pdf