SemEval-2024 Task 1: Semantic Textual Relatedness for African and Asian Languages
This addresses the limited NLP resources for diverse languages in Africa and Asia by providing a benchmark for semantic relatedness, though it is incremental as it builds on earlier similarity-focused tasks.
The paper tackled the problem of semantic textual relatedness (STR) across 14 African and Asian languages by organizing a shared task with supervised, unsupervised, and crosslingual tracks, attracting 163 participants and receiving 70 submissions from 51 teams, with results showing best-performing systems and effective approaches.
We present the first shared task on Semantic Textual Relatedness (STR). While earlier shared tasks primarily focused on semantic similarity, we instead investigate the broader phenomenon of semantic relatedness across 14 languages: Afrikaans, Algerian Arabic, Amharic, English, Hausa, Hindi, Indonesian, Kinyarwanda, Marathi, Moroccan Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic, Punjabi, Spanish, and Telugu. These languages originate from five distinct language families and are predominantly spoken in Africa and Asia -- regions characterised by the relatively limited availability of NLP resources. Each instance in the datasets is a sentence pair associated with a score that represents the degree of semantic textual relatedness between the two sentences. Participating systems were asked to rank sentence pairs by their closeness in meaning (i.e., their degree of semantic relatedness) in the 14 languages in three main tracks: (a) supervised, (b) unsupervised, and (c) crosslingual. The task attracted 163 participants. We received 70 submissions in total (across all tasks) from 51 different teams, and 38 system description papers. We report on the best-performing systems as well as the most common and the most effective approaches for the three different tracks.