Exemplary embodiments relate to techniques to classify or detect the intent of content written in a language for which a classifier does not exist. These techniques involve building a code-switching corpus via machine translation, generating a universal embedding for words in the code-switching corpus, training a classifier on the universal embeddings to generate an embedding mapping/table; accessing new content written in a language for which a specific classifier may not exist, and mapping entries in the embedding mapping/table to the universal embeddings. Using these techniques, a classifier can be applied to the universal embedding without needing to be trained on a particular language. Exemplary embodiments may be applied to recognize similarities in two content items, make recommendations, find similar documents, perform deduplication, and perform topic tagging for stories in foreign languages.