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Apple Machine Learning Research·· 2026-10-1427

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

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

Brief overview

Whisper-small achieved an average F1 score of 0.798 across 14 language pairs in the CS-FLEURS benchmark test, surpassing CNN's 0.776 and HuBERT's linear baseline's 0.751. The method detects language switching directly from speech by identifying the language-selective hidden state dimension in pre-trained speech encoders, and only requires a small amount of code to convert the dataset to fine-tune decision rules.

Article

AuthorsJie Chi, Zakaria Aldeneh, Masha Fedzechkina, Maureen de Seyssel, Natalie Schluter

Code-switching (CS), the alternation between languages within an utterance, is common in multilingual speech but underrepresented in pretraining corpora. Increasing CS coverage requires finding relevant utterances in large speech collections so that they can be included in training data. One way to find such utterances is to transcribe the speech and detect language alternation in the text, but this depends on obtaining accurate multilingual transcriptions. We propose a lightweight method that detects CS directly from speech. It uses frame-level language information in pretrained speech encoders to determine whether both languages are present within an utterance. Specifically, we identify language-selective hidden-state dimensions using monolingual recordings and aggregate their frame-level activations into a CS prediction. With a small CS set used to tune a decision rule, we show that the Whisper-small encoder achieves a mean F1 of 0.798 across 14 language pairs in CS-FLEURS, compared with 0.776 for a CNN and 0.751 for a HuBERT linear baseline trained for monolingual language identification. Our findings suggest that pretrained speech encoders already encode the information needed to identify CS utterances, and they provide a lightweight tool for building more representative multilingual corpora.

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Source: Apple Machine Learning Research · machinelearning.apple.com