CLJan 14, 2021

SICKNL: A Dataset for Dutch Natural Language Inference

arXiv:2101.05716v130 citations
Originality Synthesis-oriented
AI Analysis

This provides a dataset for evaluating NLP models in Dutch, but it is incremental as it builds on an existing English dataset.

The authors tackled the lack of a Dutch dataset for Natural Language Inference by creating SICK-NL through translation of the English SICK dataset, finding that all models performed worse on the Dutch version, indicating it is more challenging.

We present SICK-NL (read: signal), a dataset targeting Natural Language Inference in Dutch. SICK-NL is obtained by translating the SICK dataset of Marelli et al. (2014)from English into Dutch. Having a parallel inference dataset allows us to compare both monolingual and multilingual NLP models for English and Dutch on the two tasks. In the paper, we motivate and detail the translation process, perform a baseline evaluation on both the original SICK dataset and its Dutch incarnation SICK-NL, taking inspiration from Dutch skipgram embeddings and contextualised embedding models. In addition, we encapsulate two phenomena encountered in the translation to formulate stress tests and verify how well the Dutch models capture syntactic restructurings that do not affect semantics. Our main finding is all models perform worse on SICK-NL than on SICK, indicating that the Dutch dataset is more challenging than the English original. Results on the stress tests show that models don't fully capture word order freedom in Dutch, warranting future systematic studies.

Code Implementations1 repo
Foundations

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