Code-switched inspired losses for generic spoken dialog representations

Spoken dialog systems need to be able to handle both multiple languages and multilinguality inside a conversation (e.g in case of code-switching). In this work, we introduce new pretraining losses tailored to learn multilingual spoken dialog representations. The goal of these losses is to expose the model to code-switched language. To scale up training, we automatically build a pretraining corpus composed of multilingual conversations in five different languages (French, Italian, English, German and Spanish) from OpenSubtitles, a huge multilingual corpus composed of 24.3G tokens. We test the generic representations on MIAM, a new benchmark composed of five dialog act corpora on the same aforementioned languages as well as on two novel multilingual downstream tasks (i.e multilingual mask utterance retrieval and multilingual inconsistency identification). Our experiments show that our new code switched-inspired losses achieve a better performance in both monolingual and multilingual settings.