# Reducing language context confusion for end-to-end code-switching automatic speech recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.12155 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12155/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 30 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Jan 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [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)
- [When Does Label Smoothing Help?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02629/) (2019)
- [Speech Recognition with Deep Recurrent Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1303.5778/) (2013)
- [Listen, Attend and Spell](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.01211/) (2015)
- [Exploring Architectures, Data and Units For Streaming End-to-End Speech Recognition with RNN-Transducer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.00841/) (2018)
- [Cold Fusion: Training Seq2Seq Models Together with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.06426/) (2017)
- [Bytes are All You Need: End-to-End Multilingual Speech Recognition and Synthesis with Bytes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.09021/) (2018)
- [The ASRU 2019 Mandarin-English Code-Switching Speech Recognition Challenge: Open Datasets, Tracks, Methods and Results](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.05916/) (2020)
- [Code-switching Sentence Generation by Generative Adversarial Networks and its Application to Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.02356/) (2018)
- [Towards Language-Universal End-to-End Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.02207/) (2017)
- [Acoustic and Textual Data Augmentation for Improved ASR of Code-Switching Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.10945/) (2018)
- [Learn Spelling from Teachers: Transferring Knowledge from Language Models to Sequence-to-Sequence Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.06017/) (2019)
- [Decoupling Pronunciation and Language for End-to-end Code-switching Automatic Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.14798/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [The Decades Progress on Code-Switching Research in NLP: A Systematic Survey on Trends and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09660/) (2022)
- [LAE: Language-Aware Encoder for Monolingual and Multilingual ASR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02093/) (2022)
- [Code-Switching without Switching: Language Agnostic End-to-End Speech Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.01512/) (2022)
- [BA-MoE: Boundary-Aware Mixture-of-Experts Adapter for Code-Switching Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.02629/) (2023)
- [Can we train ASR systems on Code-switch without real code-switch data? Case study for Singapore's languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.14177/) (2025)
- [Adding Robust Code-Switching Capabilities to High Performance Multilingual ASR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.21990/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Code-switching deals with alternative languages in communication process. Training end-to-end (E2E) automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems for code-switching is especially challenging as code-switching training data are always insufficient to combat the increased multilingual context confusion due to the presence of more than one language. We propose a language-related attention mechanism to reduce multilingual context confusion for the E2E code-switching ASR model based on the Equivalence Constraint (EC) Theory. The linguistic theory requires that any monolingual fragment that occurs in the code-switching sentence must occur in one of the monolingual sentences. The theory establishes a bridge between monolingual data and code-switching data. We leverage this linguistics theory to design the code-switching E2E ASR model. The proposed model efficiently transfers language knowledge from rich monolingual data to improve the performance of the code-switching ASR model. We evaluate our model on ASRU 2019 Mandarin-English code-switching challenge dataset. Compared to the baseline model, our proposed model achieves a 17.12% relative error reduction.