CreoleVal: Multilingual Multitask Benchmarks for Creoles

Heather Lent, Kushal Tatariya, Raj Dabre, Yiyi Chen, Marcell Fekete, Esther Ploeger, Li Zhou, Ruth-Ann Armstrong, Abee Eijansantos, Catriona Malau, Hans Erik Heje, Ernests Lavrinovics, Diptesh Kanojia, Paul Belony, Marcel Bollmann, Loïc Grobol, Miryam de Lhoneux, Daniel Hershcovich, Michel DeGraff, Anders Søgaard, Johannes Bjerva


Abstract
Creoles represent an under-explored and marginalized group of languages, with few available resources for NLP research. While the genealogical ties between Creoles and a number of highly resourced languages imply a significant potential for transfer learning, this potential is hampered due to this lack of annotated data. In this work we present CreoleVal, a collection of benchmark datasets spanning 8 different NLP tasks, covering up to 28 Creole languages; it is an aggregate of novel development datasets for reading comprehension relation classification, and machine translation for Creoles, in addition to a practical gateway to a handful of preexisting benchmarks. For each benchmark, we conduct baseline experiments in a zero-shot setting in order to further ascertain the capabilities and limitations of transfer learning for Creoles. Ultimately, we see CreoleVal as an opportunity to empower research on Creoles in NLP and computational linguistics, and in general, a step towards more equitable language technology around the globe.
Anthology ID:
2024.tacl-1.53
Volume:
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 12
Month:
Year:
2024
Address:
Cambridge, MA
Venue:
TACL
SIG:
Publisher:
MIT Press
Note:
Pages:
950–978
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.tacl-1.53
DOI:
10.1162/tacl_a_00682
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Heather Lent, Kushal Tatariya, Raj Dabre, Yiyi Chen, Marcell Fekete, Esther Ploeger, Li Zhou, Ruth-Ann Armstrong, Abee Eijansantos, Catriona Malau, Hans Erik Heje, Ernests Lavrinovics, Diptesh Kanojia, Paul Belony, Marcel Bollmann, Loïc Grobol, Miryam de Lhoneux, Daniel Hershcovich, Michel DeGraff, et al.. 2024. CreoleVal: Multilingual Multitask Benchmarks for Creoles. Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 12:950–978.
Cite (Informal):
CreoleVal: Multilingual Multitask Benchmarks for Creoles (Lent et al., TACL 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.tacl-1.53.pdf