DIALECTBENCH: An NLP Benchmark for Dialects, Varieties, and Closely-Related Languages

Fahim Faisal, Orevaoghene Ahia, Aarohi Srivastava, Kabir Ahuja, David Chiang, Yulia Tsvetkov, Antonios Anastasopoulos


Abstract
Language technologies should be judged on their usefulness in real-world use cases. An often overlooked aspect in natural language processing (NLP) research and evaluation is language variation in the form of non-standard dialects or language varieties (hereafter, varieties). Most NLP benchmarks are limited to standard language varieties. To fill this gap, we propose DIALECTBENCH, the first-ever large-scale benchmark for NLP on varieties, which aggregates an extensive set of task-varied varieties datasets (10 text-level tasks covering 281 varieties). This allows for a comprehensive evaluation of NLP system performance on different varieties. We provide substantial proof of performance disparities between standard and non-standard language varieties, and we also identify language clusters with larger performance divergence across tasks.We believe DIALECTBENCH provides a comprehensive view of the current state of NLP for varieties and one step towards advancing it further.
Anthology ID:
2024.acl-long.777
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:
14412–14454
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URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.777
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Fahim Faisal, Orevaoghene Ahia, Aarohi Srivastava, Kabir Ahuja, David Chiang, Yulia Tsvetkov, and Antonios Anastasopoulos. 2024. DIALECTBENCH: An NLP Benchmark for Dialects, Varieties, and Closely-Related Languages. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 14412–14454, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
DIALECTBENCH: An NLP Benchmark for Dialects, Varieties, and Closely-Related Languages (Faisal et al., ACL 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.777.pdf