arXiv Computation and Language

A Two-Way Street: Surveying the Interplay between Code-Mixing and Native Languages in Text and Speech

The paper surveys how code‑mixed (CM) text and speech systems transfer knowledge between CM data and the native languages involved, a process that can go in both directions. It introduces a taxonomy of transfer direction, route, and modality, and finds that most work transfers from native languages to CM, while the reverse is newer and mainly aligns the two languages. The study notes that text and speech methods overlap but rarely cite each other, and that native data often outperforms new architectures on shared speech benchmarks, highlighting open questions about data mixing and evaluation across scripts.

arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 16

Code-Switching Detection via Language-Selective Dimensions in Speech Foundation Models

The paper introduces a lightweight approach to detect code‑switching (CS) directly from speech by leveraging language‑selective hidden‑state dimensions in pretrained speech encoders. Using monolingual recordings to identify these dimensions, the method aggregates frame‑level activations to predict CS presence, achieving a mean F1 score of 0.798 on the CS‑FLEURS dataset with the Whisper‑small encoder. This demonstrates that pretrained speech models inherently encode CS information, offering a practical tool for expanding multilingual corpora.

By Jie Chi, Zakaria Aldeneh, Masha Fedzechkina, Maureen de Seyssel, Natalie Schluter
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 2

Phrase-Localized Language-Contrastive Guidance: Training-Free Localized Accent Control for Code-Switching Text-to-Speech

arXiv:2609.01016v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Current speech synthesis struggles with code-switching, which mixes a foreign language phrase into a primary language utterance, causing the phrase to...

By Che Hyun Lee, Sangkwon Park, Donghun Kang, Dongwook Lee, Youngho Cho, Heeseung Kim, Sungroh Yoon
arXiv Computation and Language
2d ago

Synthetic-to-Real Code-Switched ASR: A Spontaneous Nepali-English Podcast Benchmark

The paper introduces a new benchmark of 13,044 spontaneous Nepali‑English code‑switched podcast utterances, totaling 15.45 h, and evaluates a two‑stage synthetic‑to‑real adaptation framework for ASR. Stage 1 uses supervised fine‑tuning on 0.95 h of synthetic speech, reducing Mixed Error Rate from 23.40 % to 21.52 % and switch‑point error rate from 35.89 % to 28.77 %. Stage 2 applies Group Relative Policy Optimization with script and transcription rewards, yielding modest but statistically significant further improvements, particularly in English script confusion and switch‑point accuracy. The study also shows that an auxiliary script reward term offers no benefit beyond MER‑only optimization in this setting, and that the synthetic SFT provides the main cross‑domain transfer to spontaneous human speech.

By Firoj Paudel
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 28

AfriSwitch: A Benchmark for In-the-Wild African Code-Switched Speech Recognition

AfriSwitch is a 61.36‑hour, human‑transcribed benchmark of in‑the‑wild code‑switched speech covering 16 African languages and varieties, annotated with switch‑level English span tags, per‑utterance Code‑Mixing Index (CMI), and switch‑point counts. The corpus reveals that code‑switching behaviour varies widely across languages, with no single metric fully capturing how code‑switched a language is. Benchmarking five open and commercial multilingual ASR systems in a zero‑shot setting shows high word error rates, with the best system averaging 35.93% WER and none dropping below 24% on any language, indicating that Africa‑targeted training rather than model scale or nominal language coverage best predicts performance.

By Gabrial Zencha Ashungafac, Busayo Awobade, Tobi Olatunji
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 7

Improving Language Identification for Code-Switched Utterances with Integer Linear Programming

The paper addresses the challenge of identifying code‑switched utterances in language identification systems. It revisits the MaskLID approach, highlighting its overreliance on word‑level language association scores, and reformulates its optimization as an Integer Linear Program to incorporate clear, interpretable constraints. These enhancements significantly improve performance across ten diverse languages on code‑switching benchmarks, with the authors releasing code and data for reproducibility.

By Joanna Rado{\l}a, Josep Maria Crego, Fran\c{c}ois Yvon
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 11

Beyond Word Error Rate: A Switch Aware Evaluation of ASR and Audio Language Models on English Yoruba Code-Switched Speech

arXiv:2609. 11786v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems and audio language models (audio LMs) now report low error rates on monolingual benchmarks, but their behavior on code switched speech in low resource, diacritic rich languages remains poorly characterized.

By Chibuzor Okocha, Christan Earl Grant