Enhancing Code-Switching for Cross-lingual SLU: A Unified View of Semantic and Grammatical Coherence
Zhihong Zhu, Xuxin Cheng, Zhiqi Huang, Dongsheng Chen, Yuexian Zou
Abstract
Despite the success of spoken language understanding (SLU) in high-resource languages, achieving similar performance in low-resource settings, such as zero-shot scenarios, remains challenging due to limited labeled training data. To improve zero-shot cross-lingual SLU, recent studies have explored code-switched sentences containing tokens from multiple languages. However, vanilla code-switched sentences often lack semantic and grammatical coherence. We ascribe this lack to two issues: (1) randomly replacing code-switched tokens with equal probability and (2) disregarding token-level dependency within each language. To tackle these issues, in this paper, we propose a novel method termed SoGo, for zero-shot cross-lingual SLU. First, we use a saliency-based substitution approach to extract keywords as substitution options. Then, we introduce a novel token-level alignment strategy that considers the similarity between the context and the code-switched tokens, ensuring grammatical coherence in code-switched sentences. Extensive experiments and analyses demonstrate the superior performance of SoGo across nine languages on MultiATIS++.- Anthology ID:
- 2023.emnlp-main.486
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
- Month:
- December
- Year:
- 2023
- Address:
- Singapore
- Editors:
- Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
- Venue:
- EMNLP
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 7849–7856
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.486
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.486
- Cite (ACL):
- Zhihong Zhu, Xuxin Cheng, Zhiqi Huang, Dongsheng Chen, and Yuexian Zou. 2023. Enhancing Code-Switching for Cross-lingual SLU: A Unified View of Semantic and Grammatical Coherence. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 7849–7856, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Enhancing Code-Switching for Cross-lingual SLU: A Unified View of Semantic and Grammatical Coherence (Zhu et al., EMNLP 2023)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-3/2023.emnlp-main.486.pdf