Are Multilingual Models the Best Choice for Moderately Under-Resourced Languages? A Comprehensive Assessment for Catalan

Result code in IS VaVaI

<a href="https://www.isvavai.cz/riv?ss=detail&h=RIV%2F00216208%3A11320%2F21%3A10440896" target="_blank" >RIV/00216208:11320/21:10440896 - isvavai.cz</a>

Result on the web

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DOI - Digital Object Identifier

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Result language

angličtina

Original language name

Are Multilingual Models the Best Choice for Moderately Under-Resourced Languages? A Comprehensive Assessment for Catalan

Original language description

Multilingual language models have been a crucial breakthrough as they considerably reduce the need of data for under-resourced languages. Nevertheless, the superiority of language-specific models has already been proven for languages having access to large amounts of data. In this work, we focus on Catalan with the aim to explore to what extent a medium-sized monolingual language model is competitive with state-of-the-art large multilingual models. For this, we: (1) build a clean, high-quality textual Catalan corpus (CaText), the largest to date (but only a fraction of the usual size of the previous work in monolingual language models), (2) train a Transformer-based language model for Catalan (BERTa), and (3) devise a thorough evaluation in a diversity of settings, comprising a complete array of downstream tasks, namely, Part of Speech Tagging, Named Entity Recognition and Classification, Text Classification, Question Answering, and Semantic Textual Similarity, with most of the corresponding datasets being created ex novo. The result is a new benchmark, the Catalan Language Understanding Benchmark (CLUB), which we publish as an open resource, together with the clean textual corpus, the language model, and the cleaning pipeline. Using state-of-the-art multilingual models and a monolingual model trained only on Wikipedia as baselines, we consistently observe the superiority of our model across tasks and settings.

Czech name

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Czech description

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Type

D - Article in proceedings

CEP classification

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OECD FORD branch

10201 - Computer sciences, information science, bioinformathics (hardware development to be 2.2, social aspect to be 5.8)

Project

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Continuities

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Publication year

2021

Confidentiality

S - Úplné a pravdivé údaje o projektu nepodléhají ochraně podle zvláštních právních předpisů

Article name in the collection

Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2021

ISBN

978-1-954085-54-1

ISSN

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e-ISSN

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Number of pages

14

Pages from-to

4933-4946

Publisher name

Association for Computational Linguistics

Place of publication

Stroudsburg

Event location

online

Event date

Aug 1, 2021

Type of event by nationality

WRD - Celosvětová akce

UT code for WoS article

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