Consolidating and Developing Benchmarking Datasets for the Nepali Natural Language Understanding Tasks
This addresses the need for comprehensive evaluation tools for NLP models in Nepali, a low-resource language with unique linguistic challenges, though it is incremental as it builds on existing benchmarks.
The authors tackled the limited scope of existing Nepali language benchmarks by introducing twelve new datasets across diverse NLU tasks, creating the NLUE benchmark, and found that existing top models struggle with these tasks while multilingual models generally outperform monolingual ones.
The Nepali language has distinct linguistic features, especially its complex script (Devanagari script), morphology, and various dialects,which pose a unique challenge for Natural Language Understanding (NLU) tasks. While the Nepali Language Understanding Evaluation (Nep-gLUE) benchmark provides a foundation for evaluating models, it remains limited in scope, covering four tasks. This restricts their utility for comprehensive assessments of Natural Language Processing (NLP) models. To address this limitation, we introduce twelve new datasets, creating a new benchmark, the Nepali /Language Understanding Evaluation (NLUE) benchmark for evaluating the performance of models across a diverse set of Natural Language Understanding (NLU) tasks. The added tasks include Single-Sentence Classification, Similarity and Paraphrase Tasks, Natural Language Inference (NLI), and General Masked Evaluation Task (GMET). Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that existing top models struggle with the added complexity of these tasks. We also find that the best multilingual model outperforms the best monolingual models across most tasks, highlighting the need for more robust solutions tailored to the Nepali language. This expanded benchmark sets a new standard for evaluating, comparing, and advancing models, contributing significantly to the broader goal of advancing NLP research for low-resource languages.