The Belebele Benchmark: a Parallel Reading Comprehension Dataset in 122 Language Variants

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Bandarkar, Lucas, Liang, Davis, Muller, Benjamin, Artetxe, Mikel, Shukla, Satya Narayan, Husa, Donald, Goyal, Naman, Krishnan, Abhinandan, Zettlemoyer, Luke, Khabsa, Madian
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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author Bandarkar, Lucas
Liang, Davis
Muller, Benjamin
Artetxe, Mikel
Shukla, Satya Narayan
Husa, Donald
Goyal, Naman
Krishnan, Abhinandan
Zettlemoyer, Luke
Khabsa, Madian
author_facet Bandarkar, Lucas
Liang, Davis
Muller, Benjamin
Artetxe, Mikel
Shukla, Satya Narayan
Husa, Donald
Goyal, Naman
Krishnan, Abhinandan
Zettlemoyer, Luke
Khabsa, Madian
contents We present Belebele, a multiple-choice machine reading comprehension (MRC) dataset spanning 122 language variants. Significantly expanding the language coverage of natural language understanding (NLU) benchmarks, this dataset enables the evaluation of text models in high-, medium-, and low-resource languages. Each question is based on a short passage from the Flores-200 dataset and has four multiple-choice answers. The questions were carefully curated to discriminate between models with different levels of general language comprehension. The English dataset on its own proves difficult enough to challenge state-of-the-art language models. Being fully parallel, this dataset enables direct comparison of model performance across all languages. We use this dataset to evaluate the capabilities of multilingual masked language models (MLMs) and large language models (LLMs). We present extensive results and find that despite significant cross-lingual transfer in English-centric LLMs, much smaller MLMs pretrained on balanced multilingual data still understand far more languages. We also observe that larger vocabulary size and conscious vocabulary construction correlate with better performance on low-resource languages. Overall, Belebele opens up new avenues for evaluating and analyzing the multilingual capabilities of NLP systems.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2308_16884
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The Belebele Benchmark: a Parallel Reading Comprehension Dataset in 122 Language Variants
Bandarkar, Lucas
Liang, Davis
Muller, Benjamin
Artetxe, Mikel
Shukla, Satya Narayan
Husa, Donald
Goyal, Naman
Krishnan, Abhinandan
Zettlemoyer, Luke
Khabsa, Madian
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
I.2.7
We present Belebele, a multiple-choice machine reading comprehension (MRC) dataset spanning 122 language variants. Significantly expanding the language coverage of natural language understanding (NLU) benchmarks, this dataset enables the evaluation of text models in high-, medium-, and low-resource languages. Each question is based on a short passage from the Flores-200 dataset and has four multiple-choice answers. The questions were carefully curated to discriminate between models with different levels of general language comprehension. The English dataset on its own proves difficult enough to challenge state-of-the-art language models. Being fully parallel, this dataset enables direct comparison of model performance across all languages. We use this dataset to evaluate the capabilities of multilingual masked language models (MLMs) and large language models (LLMs). We present extensive results and find that despite significant cross-lingual transfer in English-centric LLMs, much smaller MLMs pretrained on balanced multilingual data still understand far more languages. We also observe that larger vocabulary size and conscious vocabulary construction correlate with better performance on low-resource languages. Overall, Belebele opens up new avenues for evaluating and analyzing the multilingual capabilities of NLP systems.
title The Belebele Benchmark: a Parallel Reading Comprehension Dataset in 122 Language Variants
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
I.2.7
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.16884