BUFFET: Benchmarking Large Language Models for Few-shot Cross-lingual Transfer

Akari Asai, Sneha Kudugunta, Xinyan Yu, Terra Blevins, Hila Gonen, Machel Reid, Yulia Tsvetkov, Sebastian Ruder, Hannaneh Hajishirzi


Abstract
Despite remarkable advancements in few-shot generalization in natural language processing, most models are developed and evaluated primarily in English. To establish a rigorous and equitable evaluation framework for few-shot cross-lingual transfer, we introduce a new benchmark, called BUFFET, which unifies 15 diverse tasks across 54 languages in a sequence-to-sequence format and provides a fixed set of few-shot examples and instructions. Using BUFFET, we perform thorough evaluations of ten state-of-the-art multilingual large language models with different transfer methods, namely in-context learning and fine-tuning. Our findings reveal significant room for improvement in few-shot in-context cross-lingual transfer. Strong multilingual pre-trained or instruction-tuned models such as BLOOM or ChatGPT often lag behind much smaller mT5-base models given the same number of few-shot samples, particularly in low-resource languages. Our analysis suggests avenues for future research in few-shot cross-lingual transfer.
Anthology ID:
2024.naacl-long.100
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
June
Year:
2024
Address:
Mexico City, Mexico
Editors:
Kevin Duh, Helena Gomez, Steven Bethard
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1771–1800
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.100
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Akari Asai, Sneha Kudugunta, Xinyan Yu, Terra Blevins, Hila Gonen, Machel Reid, Yulia Tsvetkov, Sebastian Ruder, and Hannaneh Hajishirzi. 2024. BUFFET: Benchmarking Large Language Models for Few-shot Cross-lingual Transfer. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 1771–1800, Mexico City, Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
BUFFET: Benchmarking Large Language Models for Few-shot Cross-lingual Transfer (Asai et al., NAACL 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.100.pdf
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 2024.naacl-long.100.copyright.pdf