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

Abstract

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.