Leveraging Zipformer Model for Effective Language Identification in Code-Switched Child-Directed Speech

This paper addresses this challenge by using Zipformer to handle the nuances of speech which contains two imbalanced languages - Mandarin and English - in an utterance. This work demonstrates that the internal layers of the Zipformer effectively encode the language characteristics, which can be leveraged in language identification. We present the selection methodology of the inner layers to extract the em-beddings and make a comparison with different back-ends. Our analysis shows that Zipformer is robust across these backends. Our approach effectively handles imbalanced data, achieving a Balanced Accuracy (BAC) of 81.89%, a 15.47% improvement over the language identification baseline.