ORCA: A Challenging Benchmark for Arabic Language Understanding

AbdelRahim Elmadany, ElMoatez Billah Nagoudi, Muhammad Abdul-Mageed


Abstract
Due to the crucial role pretrained language models play in modern NLP, several benchmarks have been proposed to evaluate their performance. In spite of these efforts, no public benchmark of diverse nature currently exists for evaluating Arabic NLU. This makes it challenging to measure progress for both Arabic and multilingual language models. This challenge is compounded by the fact that any benchmark targeting Arabic needs to take into account the fact that Arabic is not a single language but rather a collection of languages and language varieties. In this work, we introduce a publicly available benchmark for Arabic language understanding evaluation dubbed ORCA. It is carefully constructed to cover diverse Arabic varieties and a wide range of challenging Arabic understanding tasks exploiting 60 different datasets (across seven NLU task clusters). To measure current progress in Arabic NLU, we use ORCA to offer a comprehensive comparison between 18 multilingual and Arabic language models. We also provide a public leaderboard with a unified single-number evaluation metric (ORCA score) to facilitate future research.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-acl.609
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
9559–9586
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.609
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-acl.609
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
AbdelRahim Elmadany, ElMoatez Billah Nagoudi, and Muhammad Abdul-Mageed. 2023. ORCA: A Challenging Benchmark for Arabic Language Understanding. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023, pages 9559–9586, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
ORCA: A Challenging Benchmark for Arabic Language Understanding (Elmadany et al., Findings 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.609.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.609.mp4