Abstract
Generating code-switched text is a problem of growing interest, especially given the scarcity of corpora containing large volumes of real code-switched text. In this work, we adapt a state-of-the-art neural machine translation model to generate Hindi-English code-switched sentences starting from monolingual Hindi sentences. We outline a carefully designed curriculum of pretraining steps, including the use of synthetic code-switched text, that enable the model to generate high-quality code-switched text. Using text generated from our model as data augmentation, we show significant reductions in perplexity on a language modeling task, compared to using text from other generative models of CS text. We also show improvements using our text for a downstream code-switched natural language inference task. Our generated text is further subjected to a rigorous evaluation using a human evaluation study and a range of objective metrics, where we show performance comparable (and sometimes even superior) to code-switched text obtained via crowd workers who are native Hindi speakers.- Anthology ID:
- 2021.acl-long.245
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)
- Month:
- August
- Year:
- 2021
- Address:
- Online
- Editors:
- Chengqing Zong, Fei Xia, Wenjie Li, Roberto Navigli
- Venues:
- ACL | IJCNLP
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 3154–3169
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.245
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2021.acl-long.245
- Cite (ACL):
- Ishan Tarunesh, Syamantak Kumar, and Preethi Jyothi. 2021. From Machine Translation to Code-Switching: Generating High-Quality Code-Switched Text. In Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 3154–3169, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- From Machine Translation to Code-Switching: Generating High-Quality Code-Switched Text (Tarunesh et al., ACL-IJCNLP 2021)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-1/2021.acl-long.245.pdf
- Code
- ishan00/translation-for-code-switching-acl