TAPE: Assessing Few-shot Russian Language Understanding
This addresses the problem of limited progress in non-English few-shot learning for researchers, though it is incremental as it extends existing evaluation paradigms to a new language.
The authors tackled the lack of standardized evaluation suites for non-English languages in few-shot learning by proposing TAPE, a benchmark for Russian language understanding, which revealed that spelling-based perturbations most affect performance and showed a significant gap between neural and human baselines.
Recent advances in zero-shot and few-shot learning have shown promise for a scope of research and practical purposes. However, this fast-growing area lacks standardized evaluation suites for non-English languages, hindering progress outside the Anglo-centric paradigm. To address this line of research, we propose TAPE (Text Attack and Perturbation Evaluation), a novel benchmark that includes six more complex NLU tasks for Russian, covering multi-hop reasoning, ethical concepts, logic and commonsense knowledge. The TAPE's design focuses on systematic zero-shot and few-shot NLU evaluation: (i) linguistic-oriented adversarial attacks and perturbations for analyzing robustness, and (ii) subpopulations for nuanced interpretation. The detailed analysis of testing the autoregressive baselines indicates that simple spelling-based perturbations affect the performance the most, while paraphrasing the input has a more negligible effect. At the same time, the results demonstrate a significant gap between the neural and human baselines for most tasks. We publicly release TAPE (tape-benchmark.com) to foster research on robust LMs that can generalize to new tasks when little to no supervision is available.