Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly influenced the landscape of language and speech research. Despite this progress, these models lack specific benchmarking against state-of-the-art (SOTA) models tailored to particular languages and tasks. LAraBench addresses this gap for Arabic Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Speech Processing tasks, including sequence tagging and content classification across different domains. We utilized models such as GPT-3.5-turbo, GPT-4, BLOOMZ, Jais-13b-chat, Whisper, and USM, employing zero and few-shot learning techniques to tackle 33 distinct tasks across 61 publicly available datasets. This involved 98 experimental setups, encompassing ~296K data points, ~46 hours of speech, and 30 sentences for Text-to-Speech (TTS). This effort resulted in 330+ sets of experiments. Our analysis focused on measuring the performance gap between SOTA models and LLMs. The overarching trend observed was that SOTA models generally outperformed LLMs in zero-shot learning, with a few exceptions. Notably, larger computational models with few-shot learning techniques managed to reduce these performance gaps. Our findings provide valuable insights into the applicability of LLMs for Arabic NLP and speech processing tasks.

The recent development and success of Large Language Models (LLMs) necessitate an evaluation of their performance across diverse NLP tasks in different languages. Although several frameworks have been developed and made publicly available, their customization capabilities for specific tasks and datasets are often complex for different users. In this study, we introduce the LLMeBench framework, which can be seamlessly customized to evaluate LLMs for any NLP task, regardless of language. The framework features generic dataset loaders, several model providers, and pre-implements most standard evaluation metrics. It supports in-context learning with zero- and few-shot settings. A specific dataset and task can be evaluated for a given LLM in less than 20 lines of code while allowing full flexibility to extend the framework for custom datasets, models, or tasks. The framework has been tested on 31 unique NLP tasks using 53 publicly available datasets within 90 experimental setups, involving approximately 296K data points. We open-sourced LLMeBench for the community (https://github.com/qcri/LLMeBench/) and a video demonstrating the framework is available online (https://youtu.be/9cC2m_abk3A).

Despite their remarkable ability to capture linguistic nuances across diverse languages, questions persist regarding the degree of alignment between languages in multilingual embeddings. Drawing inspiration from research on high-dimensional representations in neural language models, we employ clustering to uncover latent concepts within multilingual models. Our analysis focuses on quantifying the alignment and overlap of these concepts across various languages within the latent space. To this end, we introduce two metrics CALIGN and COLAP aimed at quantifying these aspects, enabling a deeper exploration of multilingual embeddings. Our study encompasses three multilingual models (mT5, mBERT, and XLM-R) and three downstream tasks (Machine Translation, Named Entity Recognition, and Sentiment Analysis). Key findings from our analysis include: i) deeper layers in the network demonstrate increased cross-lingual alignment due to the presence of language-agnostic concepts, ii) fine-tuning of the models enhances alignment within the latent space, and iii) such task-specific calibration helps in explaining the emergence of zero-shot capabilities in the models.

Work done to uncover the knowledge encoded within pre-trained language models rely on annotated corpora or human-in-the-loop methods. However, these approaches are limited in terms of scalability and the scope of interpretation. We propose using a large language model, ChatGPT, as an annotator to enable fine-grained interpretation analysis of pre-trained language models. We discover latent concepts within pre-trained language models by applying agglomerative hierarchical clustering over contextualized representations and then annotate these concepts using ChatGPT. Our findings demonstrate that ChatGPT produces accurate and semantically richer annotations compared to human-annotated concepts. Additionally, we showcase how GPT-based annotations empower interpretation analysis methodologies of which we demonstrate two: probing frameworks and neuron interpretation. To facilitate further exploration and experimentation in the field, we make available a substantial ConceptNet dataset (TCN) comprising 39,000 annotated concepts.