Learn to Code-Switch: Data Augmentation using Copy Mechanism on Language Modeling

Abstract

Building large-scale datasets for training code-switching language models is challenging and very expensive. To alleviate this problem using parallel corpus has been a major workaround. However, existing solutions use linguistic constraints which may not capture the real data distribution. In this work, we propose a novel method for learning how to generate code-switching sentences from parallel corpora. Our model uses a Seq2Seq model in combination with pointer networks to align and choose words from the monolingual sentences and form a grammatical code-switching sentence. In our experiment, we show that by training a language model using the augmented sentences we improve the perplexity score by 10% compared to the LSTM baseline.