Code-switching, the use of more than one language within a single utterance, is ubiquitous in much of the world, but remains a challenge for NLP largely due to the lack of representative data for training models. In this paper, we present a novel model architecture that is trained exclusively on monolingual resources, but can be applied to unseen code-switched text at inference time. The model accomplishes this by jointly maintaining separate word representations for each of the possible languages-or scripts in the case of transliteration-allowing each to contribute to inferences without forcing the model to commit to a language. Experiments on Hindi-English part-of-speech tagging demonstrate that our approach outperforms standard models when training on monolingual text without transliteration, and testing on code-switched text with alternate scripts.
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