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

Lucas Bandarkar, Davis Liang, Benjamin Muller, Mikel Artetxe, Satya Narayan Shukla, Donald Husa, Naman Goyal, Abhinandan Krishnan, Luke Zettlemoyer, Madian Khabsa


Abstract
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 findings, notably that despite significant cross-lingual transfer in English-centric LLMs, much smaller MLMs pretrained on balanced multilingual data still understand far more languages. Overall, Belebele opens up new avenues for evaluating and analyzing the multilingual capabilities of NLP systems.
Anthology ID:
2024.acl-long.44
Volume:
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
749–775
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.44
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.acl-long.44
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Lucas Bandarkar, Davis Liang, Benjamin Muller, Mikel Artetxe, Satya Narayan Shukla, Donald Husa, Naman Goyal, Abhinandan Krishnan, Luke Zettlemoyer, and Madian Khabsa. 2024. The Belebele Benchmark: a Parallel Reading Comprehension Dataset in 122 Language Variants. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 749–775, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
The Belebele Benchmark: a Parallel Reading Comprehension Dataset in 122 Language Variants (Bandarkar et al., ACL 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.44.pdf