Learning to Predict Code-Switching Points

Predicting possible code-switching points can help develop more accurate methods for automatically processing mixed-language text, such as multilingual language models for speech recognition systems and syntactic analyzers. We present in this paper exploratory results on learning to predict potential codeswitching points in Spanish-English. We trained different learning algorithms using a transcription of code-switched discourse. To evaluate the performance of the classifiers, we used two different criteria: 1) measuring precision, recall, and F-measure of the predictions against the reference in the transcription, and 2) rating the naturalness of artificially generated code-switched sentences. Average scores for the code-switched sentences generated by our machine learning approach were close to the scores of those generated by humans.