# ASCEND: A Spontaneous Chinese-English Dataset for Code-switching in Multi-turn Conversation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.06223 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.06223/

## Key facts

- Cited by 44 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Dec 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [wav2vec 2.0: A Framework for Self-Supervised Learning of Speech Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11477/) (2020)
- [Conformer: Convolution-augmented Transformer for Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.08100/) (2020)
- [SpecAugment: A Simple Data Augmentation Method for Automatic Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08779/) (2019)
- [AISHELL-1: An Open-Source Mandarin Speech Corpus and A Speech Recognition Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.05522/) (2017)
- [CoSDA-ML: Multi-Lingual Code-Switching Data Augmentation for Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.06402/) (2020)
- [Are Multilingual Models Effective in Code-Switching?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13309/) (2021)
- [BiToD: A Bilingual Multi-Domain Dataset For Task-Oriented Dialogue Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02787/) (2021)
- [Code-Switched Language Models Using Neural Based Synthetic Data from Parallel Sentences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.08582/) (2019)
- [The ASRU 2019 Mandarin-English Code-Switching Speech Recognition Challenge: Open Datasets, Tracks, Methods and Results](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.05916/) (2020)
- [Towards One Model to Rule All: Multilingual Strategy for Dialectal Code-Switching Arabic ASR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.14779/) (2021)
- [Unified Streaming and Non-streaming Two-pass End-to-end Model for Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.05481/) (2020)
- [Meta-Transfer Learning for Code-Switched Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14228/) (2020)
- [A Dataset for Building Code-Mixed Goal Oriented Conversation Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.05997/) (2018)
- [Code-Switching Language Modeling using Syntax-Aware Multi-Task Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.12070/) (2018)
- [OC16-CE80: A Chinese-English Mixlingual Database and A Speech Recognition Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.08412/) (2016)
- [Multilingual Transfer Learning for Code-Switched Language and Speech Neural Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06268/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 44)

- [Prompting Multilingual Large Language Models to Generate Code-Mixed Texts: The Case of South East Asian Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13592/) (2023)
- [InternLM-XComposer2.5-OmniLive: A Comprehensive Multimodal System for Long-term Streaming Video and Audio Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.09596/) (2024)
- [Prompting the Hidden Talent of Web-Scale Speech Models for Zero-Shot Task Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11095/) (2023)
- [The Decades Progress on Code-Switching Research in NLP: A Systematic Survey on Trends and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09660/) (2022)
- [Code-Switching Red-Teaming: LLM Evaluation for Safety and Multilingual Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.15481/) (2024)
- [Representativeness as a Forgotten Lesson for Multilingual and Code-switched Data Collection and Preparation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.20470/) (2023)
- [SwitchLingua: The First Large-Scale Multilingual and Multi-Ethnic Code-Switching Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.00087/) (2025)
- [Investigating Zero-Shot Generalizability on Mandarin-English Code-Switched ASR and Speech-to-text Translation of Recent Foundation Models with Self-Supervision and Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.00273/) (2023)
- [Automatic Speech Recognition Datasets in Cantonese: A Survey and New Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.02419/) (2022)
- [Do Prompts Really Prompt? Exploring the Prompt Understanding Capability of Whisper](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.05806/) (2024)
- [MaskLID: Code-Switching Language Identification through Iterative Masking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06263/) (2024)
- [CI-AVSR: A Cantonese Audio-Visual Speech Dataset for In-car Command Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03804/) (2022)
- [CS-Dialogue: A 104-Hour Dataset of Spontaneous Mandarin-English Code-Switching Dialogues for Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.18913/) (2025)
- [EntityCS: Improving Zero-Shot Cross-lingual Transfer with Entity-Centric Code Switching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.12540/) (2022)
- [CroCoSum: A Benchmark Dataset for Cross-Lingual Code-Switched Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04092/) (2023)
- [Minimal Pair-Based Evaluation of Code-Switching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01840/) (2025)
- [A Self-Refining Framework for Enhancing ASR Using TTS-Synthesized Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.11130/) (2025)
- [Adapting the adapters for code-switching in multilingual ASR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.07423/) (2023)
- [Weight Factorization and Centralization for Continual Learning in Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.16574/) (2025)
- [Optimizing Bilingual Neural Transducer with Synthetic Code-switching Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.12214/) (2022)
- [IndoRobusta: Towards Robustness Against Diverse Code-Mixed Indonesian Local Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12405/) (2023)
- [Leave No Knowledge Behind During Knowledge Distillation: Towards Practical and Effective Knowledge Distillation for Code-Switching ASR Using Realistic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10603/) (2024)
- [Code-Switching in End-to-End Automatic Speech Recognition: A Systematic Literature Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.07741/) (2025)
- [HiKE: Hierarchical Evaluation Framework for Korean-English Code-Switching Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.24613/) (2025)
- [Code-Switched Language Identification is Harder Than You Think](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.01505/) (2024)
- [DIVERS-Bench: Evaluating Language Identification Across Domain Shifts and Code-Switching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.17768/) (2025)
- [Gated Low-rank Adaptation for personalized Code-Switching Automatic Speech Recognition on the low-spec devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02562/) (2024)
- [Improving Zero-Shot Chinese-English Code-Switching ASR with kNN-CTC and Gated Monolingual Datastores](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03814/) (2024)
- [UniCoM: A Universal Code-Switching Speech Generator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.15244/) (2025)
- [From Construction to Injection: Edit-Based Fingerprints for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.03122/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Code-switching is a speech phenomenon occurring when a speaker switches language during a conversation. Despite the spontaneous nature of code-switching in conversational spoken language, most existing works collect code-switching data from read speech instead of spontaneous speech. ASCEND (A Spontaneous Chinese-English Dataset) is a high-quality Mandarin Chinese-English code-switching corpus built on spontaneous multi-turn conversational dialogue sources collected in Hong Kong. We report ASCEND's design and procedure for collecting the speech data, including annotations. ASCEND consists of 10.62 hours of clean speech, collected from 23 bilingual speakers of Chinese and English. Furthermore, we conduct baseline experiments using pre-trained wav2vec 2.0 models, achieving a best performance of 22.69% character error rate and 27.05% mixed error rate.