Existing data-to-text generation datasets are mostly limited to English. To address this lack of data, we create Table-to-Text in African languages (TaTA), the first large multilingual table-to-text dataset with a focus on African languages. We created TaTA by transcribing figures and accompanying text in bilingual reports by the Demographic and Health Surveys Program, followed by professional translation to make the dataset fully parallel. TaTA includes 8,700 examples in nine languages including four African languages (Hausa, Igbo, Swahili, and Yorùbá) and a zero-shot test language (Russian). We additionally release screenshots of the original figures for future research on multilingual multi-modal approaches. Through an in-depth human evaluation, we show that TaTA is challenging for current models and that less than half the outputs from an mT5-XXL-based model are understandable and attributable to the source data. Our results highlight a) the need for validating metrics; and b) the importance of domain-specific metrics.

We present an instance-based nearest neighbor approach to entity linking. In contrast to most prior entity retrieval systems which represent each entity with a single vector, we build a contextualized mention-encoder that learns to place similar mentions of the same entity closer in vector space than mentions of different entities. This approach allows all mentions of an entity to serve as “class prototypes” as inference involves retrieving from the full set of labeled entity mentions in the training set and applying the nearest mention neighbor’s entity label. Our model is trained on a large multilingual corpus of mention pairs derived from Wikipedia hyperlinks, and performs nearest neighbor inference on an index of 700 million mentions. It is simpler to train, gives more interpretable predictions, and outperforms all other systems on two multilingual entity linking benchmarks.

Machine learning has brought striking advances in multilingual natural language processing capabilities over the past year. For example, the latest techniques have improved the state-of-the-art performance on the XTREME multilingual benchmark by more than 13 points. While a sizeable gap to human-level performance remains, improvements have been easier to achieve in some tasks than in others. This paper analyzes the current state of cross-lingual transfer learning and summarizes some lessons learned. In order to catalyze meaningful progress, we extend XTREME to XTREME-R, which consists of an improved set of ten natural language understanding tasks, including challenging language-agnostic retrieval tasks, and covers 50 typologically diverse languages. In addition, we provide a massively multilingual diagnostic suite and fine-grained multi-dataset evaluation capabilities through an interactive public leaderboard to gain a better understanding of such models.