IndoNLG: Benchmark and Resources for Evaluating Indonesian Natural Language Generation

Samuel Cahyawijaya, Genta Indra Winata, Bryan Wilie, Karissa Vincentio, Xiaohong Li, Adhiguna Kuncoro, Sebastian Ruder, Zhi Yuan Lim, Syafri Bahar, Masayu Khodra, Ayu Purwarianti, Pascale Fung


Abstract
Natural language generation (NLG) benchmarks provide an important avenue to measure progress and develop better NLG systems. Unfortunately, the lack of publicly available NLG benchmarks for low-resource languages poses a challenging barrier for building NLG systems that work well for languages with limited amounts of data. Here we introduce IndoNLG, the first benchmark to measure natural language generation (NLG) progress in three low-resource—yet widely spoken—languages of Indonesia: Indonesian, Javanese, and Sundanese. Altogether, these languages are spoken by more than 100 million native speakers, and hence constitute an important use case of NLG systems today. Concretely, IndoNLG covers six tasks: summarization, question answering, chit-chat, and three different pairs of machine translation (MT) tasks. We collate a clean pretraining corpus of Indonesian, Sundanese, and Javanese datasets, Indo4B-Plus, which is used to pretrain our models: IndoBART and IndoGPT. We show that IndoBART and IndoGPT achieve competitive performance on all tasks—despite using only one-fifth the parameters of a larger multilingual model, mBART-large (Liu et al., 2020). This finding emphasizes the importance of pretraining on closely related, localized languages to achieve more efficient learning and faster inference at very low-resource languages like Javanese and Sundanese.
Anthology ID:
2021.emnlp-main.699
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2021
Address:
Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
Editors:
Marie-Francine Moens, Xuanjing Huang, Lucia Specia, Scott Wen-tau Yih
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
8875–8898
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.699
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-main.699
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Samuel Cahyawijaya, Genta Indra Winata, Bryan Wilie, Karissa Vincentio, Xiaohong Li, Adhiguna Kuncoro, Sebastian Ruder, Zhi Yuan Lim, Syafri Bahar, Masayu Khodra, Ayu Purwarianti, and Pascale Fung. 2021. IndoNLG: Benchmark and Resources for Evaluating Indonesian Natural Language Generation. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 8875–8898, Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
IndoNLG: Benchmark and Resources for Evaluating Indonesian Natural Language Generation (Cahyawijaya et al., EMNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.699.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.699.mp4
Code
 additional community code
Data
IndoNLGGEMLiputan6TyDiQA