Productive interactions between diverse users and language technologies require outputs from the latter to be culturally relevant and sensitive. Prior works have evaluated models’ knowledge of cultural norms, values, and artefacts, without considering how this knowledge manifests in downstream applications. In this work, we focus on extrinsic evaluation of cultural competence in two text generation tasks, open-ended question answering and story generation. We quantitatively and qualitatively evaluate model outputs when an explicit cue of culture, specifically nationality, is perturbed in the prompts. Although we find that model outputs do vary when varying nationalities and feature culturally relevant words, we also find weak correlations between text similarity of outputs for different countries and the cultural values of these countries. Finally, we discuss important considerations in designing comprehensive evaluation of cultural competence in user-facing tasks.

Multilingual evaluation benchmarks usually contain limited high-resource languages and do not test models for specific linguistic capabilities. CheckList is a template-based evaluation approach that tests models for specific capabilities. The CheckList template creation process requires native speakers, posing a challenge in scaling to hundreds of languages. In this work, we explore multiple approaches to generate Multilingual CheckLists. We device an algorithm –Template Extraction Algorithm (TEA) for automatically extracting target language CheckList templates from machine translated instances of a source language templates. We compare the TEA CheckLists with CheckLists created with different levels of human intervention. We further introduce metrics along the dimensions of cost, diversity, utility, and correctness to compare the CheckLists. We thoroughly analyze different approaches to creating CheckLists in Hindi. Furthermore, we experiment with 9 more different languages. We find that TEA followed by human verification is ideal for scaling Checklist-based evaluation to multiple languages while TEA gives a good estimates of model performance. We release the code of TEA and the CheckLists created at aka.ms/multilingualchecklist

Recent research has revealed undesirable biases in NLP data and models. However, these efforts focus of social disparities in West, and are not directly portable to other geo-cultural contexts. In this paper, we focus on NLP fairness in the context of India. We start with a brief account of the prominent axes of social disparities in India. We build resources for fairness evaluation in the Indian context and use them to demonstrate prediction biases along some of the axes. We then delve deeper into social stereotypes for Region and Religion, demonstrating its prevalence in corpora and models. Finally, we outline a holistic research agenda to re-contextualize NLP fairness research for the Indian context, accounting for Indian societal context, bridging technological gaps in NLP capabilities and resources, and adapting to Indian cultural values. While we focus on India, this framework can be generalized to other geo-cultural contexts.

Deep Contextual Language Models (LMs) like ELMO, BERT, and their successors dominate the landscape of Natural Language Processing due to their ability to scale across multiple tasks rapidly by pre-training a single model, followed by task-specific fine-tuning. Furthermore, multilingual versions of such models like XLM-R and mBERT have given promising results in zero-shot cross-lingual transfer, potentially enabling NLP applications in many under-served and under-resourced languages. Due to this initial success, pre-trained models are being used as ‘Universal Language Models’ as the starting point across diverse tasks, domains, and languages. This work explores the notion of ‘Universality’ by identifying seven dimensions across which a universal model should be able to scale, that is, perform equally well or reasonably well, to be useful across diverse settings. We outline the current theoretical and empirical results that support model performance across these dimensions, along with extensions that may help address some of their current limitations. Through this survey, we lay the foundation for understanding the capabilities and limitations of massive contextual language models and help discern research gaps and directions for future work to make these LMs inclusive and fair to diverse applications, users, and linguistic phenomena.

Despite state-of-the-art performance, NLP systems can be fragile in real-world situations. This is often due to insufficient understanding of the capabilities and limitations of models and the heavy reliance on standard evaluation benchmarks. Research into non-standard evaluation to mitigate this brittleness is gaining increasing attention. Notably, the behavioral testing principle ‘Checklist’, which decouples testing from implementation revealed significant failures in state-of-the-art models for multiple tasks. In this paper, we present a case study of using Checklist in a practical scenario. We conduct experiments for evaluating an offensive content detection system and use a data augmentation technique for improving the model using insights from Checklist. We lay out the challenges and open questions based on our observations of using Checklist for human-in-loop evaluation and improvement of NLP systems. Disclaimer: The paper contains examples of content with offensive language. The examples do not represent the views of the authors or their employers towards any person(s), group(s), practice(s), or entity/entities.