Beyond Static models and test sets: Benchmarking the potential of pre-trained models across tasks and languages

Kabir Ahuja, Sandipan Dandapat, Sunayana Sitaram, Monojit Choudhury


Abstract
Although recent Massively Multilingual Language Models (MMLMs) like mBERT and XLMR support around 100 languages, most existing multilingual NLP benchmarks provide evaluation data in only a handful of these languages with little linguistic diversity. We argue that this makes the existing practices in multilingual evaluation unreliable and does not provide a full picture of the performance of MMLMs across the linguistic landscape. We propose that the recent work done in Performance Prediction for NLP tasks can serve as a potential solution in fixing benchmarking in Multilingual NLP by utilizing features related to data and language typology to estimate the performance of an MMLM on different languages. We compare performance prediction with translating test data with a case study on four different multilingual datasets, and observe that these methods can provide reliable estimates of the performance that are often on-par with the translation based approaches, without the need for any additional translation as well as evaluation costs.
Anthology ID:
2022.nlppower-1.7
Volume:
Proceedings of NLP Power! The First Workshop on Efficient Benchmarking in NLP
Month:
May
Year:
2022
Address:
Dublin, Ireland
Editors:
Tatiana Shavrina, Vladislav Mikhailov, Valentin Malykh, Ekaterina Artemova, Oleg Serikov, Vitaly Protasov
Venue:
nlppower
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
64–74
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.nlppower-1.7
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.nlppower-1.7
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Kabir Ahuja, Sandipan Dandapat, Sunayana Sitaram, and Monojit Choudhury. 2022. Beyond Static models and test sets: Benchmarking the potential of pre-trained models across tasks and languages. In Proceedings of NLP Power! The First Workshop on Efficient Benchmarking in NLP, pages 64–74, Dublin, Ireland. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Beyond Static models and test sets: Benchmarking the potential of pre-trained models across tasks and languages (Ahuja et al., nlppower 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.nlppower-1.7.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2022.nlppower-1.7.mp4
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