# Harnessing Code Switching to Transcend the Linguistic Barrier

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.11258 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.11258/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 30 Jan 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Multilingual Code-Switching for Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Intent Prediction and Slot Filling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.07792/) (2021)
- [Hope Speech detection in under-resourced Kannada language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.04616/) (2021)
- [OffMix-3L: A Novel Code-Mixed Dataset in Bangla-English-Hindi for Offensive Language Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.18387/) (2023)
- [Cross-Lingual Text Classification of Transliterated Hindi and Malayalam](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.13620/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Code mixing (or code switching) is a common phenomenon observed in social-media content generated by a linguistically diverse user-base. Studies show that in the Indian sub-continent, a substantial fraction of social media posts exhibit code switching. While the difficulties posed by code mixed documents to further downstream analyses are well-understood, lending visibility to code mixed documents under certain scenarios may have utility that has been previously overlooked. For instance, a document written in a mixture of multiple languages can be partially accessible to a wider audience; this could be particularly useful if a considerable fraction of the audience lacks fluency in one of the component languages. In this paper, we provide a systematic approach to sample code mixed documents leveraging a polyglot embedding based method that requires minimal supervision. In the context of the 2019 India-Pakistan conflict triggered by the Pulwama terror attack, we demonstrate an untapped potential of harnessing code mixing for human well-being: starting from an existing hostility diffusing hope speech classifier solely trained on English documents, code mixed documents are utilized as a bridge to retrieve hope speech content written in a low-resource but widely used language - Romanized Hindi. Our proposed pipeline requires minimal supervision and holds promise in substantially reducing web moderation efforts.