Share What You Already Know: Cross-Language-Script Transfer and Alignment for Sentiment Detection in Code-Mixed Data

Abstract

Code-switching entails mixing multiple languages. It is an increasingly occurring phenomenon in social media texts. Usually, code-mixed texts are written in a single script, even though the languages involved have different scripts. Pre-trained multilingual models primarily utilize the data in the native script of the language. In existing studies, the code-switched texts are utilized as they are. However, using the native script for each language can generate better representations of the text owing to the pre-trained knowledge. Therefore, a cross-language-script knowledge-sharing architecture utilizing the cross-attention and alignment of the representations of text in individual language scripts was proposed in this study. Experimental results on two different datasets containing Nepali-English and Hindi-English code-switched texts, demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The interpretation of the model using the model explainability technique illustrates the sharing of language-specific knowledge between language-specific representations.