LinCE: A Centralized Benchmark for Linguistic Code-switching Evaluation

Recent trends in NLP research have raised an interest in linguistic code-switching (CS); modern approaches have been proposed to solve a wide range of NLP tasks on multiple language pairs. Unfortunately, these proposed methods are hardly generalizable to different code-switched languages. In addition, it is unclear whether a model architecture is applicable for a different task while still being compatible with the code-switching setting. This is mainly because of the lack of a centralized benchmark and the sparse corpora that researchers employ based on their specific needs and interests. To facilitate research in this direction, we propose a centralized benchmark for Linguistic Code-switching Evaluation (LinCE) that combines ten corpora covering four different code-switched language pairs (i.e., Spanish-English, Nepali-English, Hindi-English, and Modern Standard Arabic-Egyptian Arabic) and four tasks (i.e., language identification, named entity recognition, part-of-speech tagging, and sentiment analysis). As part of the benchmark centralization effort, we provide an online platform at ritual.uh.edu/lince, where researchers can submit their results while comparing with others in real-time. In addition, we provide the scores of different popular models, including LSTM, ELMo, and multilingual BERT so that the NLP community can compare against state-of-the-art systems. LinCE is a continuous effort, and we will expand it with more low-resource languages and tasks.