SEACrowd: A Multilingual Multimodal Data Hub and Benchmark Suite for Southeast Asian Languages

Southeast Asia (SEA) is a region rich in linguistic diversity and cultural variety, with over 1,300 indigenous languages and a population of 671 million people. However, prevailing AI models suffer from a significant lack of representation of texts, images, and audio datasets from SEA, compromising the quality of AI models for SEA languages. Evaluating models for SEA languages is challenging due to the scarcity of high-quality datasets, compounded by the dominance of English training data, raising concerns about potential cultural misrepresentation. To address these challenges, we introduce SEACrowd, a collaborative initiative that consolidates a comprehensive resource hub that fills the resource gap by providing standardized corpora in nearly 1,000 SEA languages across three modalities. Through our SEACrowd benchmarks, we assess the quality of AI models on 36 indigenous languages across 13 tasks, offering valuable insights into the current AI landscape in SEA. Furthermore, we propose strategies to facilitate greater AI advancements, maximizing potential utility and resource equity for the future of AI in SEA.

IndoCulture: Exploring Geographically-Influenced Cultural Commonsense Reasoning Across Eleven Indonesian Provinces

Although commonsense reasoning is greatly shaped by cultural and geographical factors, previous studies on language models have predominantly centered on English cultures, potentially resulting in an Anglocentric bias. In this paper, we introduce IndoCulture, aimed at understanding the influence of geographical factors on language model reasoning ability, with a specific emphasis on the diverse cultures found within eleven Indonesian provinces. In contrast to prior works that relied on templates (Yin et al., 2022) and online scrapping (Fung et al., 2024), we created IndoCulture by asking local people to manually develop the context and plausible options based on predefined topics. Evaluations of 23 language models reveal several insights: (1) even the best open-source model struggles with an accuracy of 53.2%, (2) models often provide more accurate predictions for specific provinces, such as Bali and West Java, and (3) the inclusion of location contexts enhances performance, especially in larger models like GPT-4, emphasizing the significance of geographical context in commonsense reasoning.

NusaCrowd: Open Source Initiative for Indonesian NLP Resources

We present NusaCrowd, a collaborative initiative to collect and unite existing resources for Indonesian languages, including opening access to previously non-public resources. Through this initiative, we have has brought together 137 datasets and 117 standardized data loaders. The quality of the datasets has been assessed manually and automatically, and their effectiveness has been demonstrated in multiple experiments. NusaCrowd's data collection enables the creation of the first zero-shot benchmarks for natural language understanding and generation in Indonesian and its local languages. Furthermore, NusaCrowd brings the creation of the first multilingual automatic speech recognition benchmark in Indonesian and its local languages. Our work is intended to help advance natural language processing research in under-represented languages.

NusaCrowd: A Call for Open and Reproducible NLP Research in Indonesian Languages

At the center of the underlying issues that halt Indonesian natural language processing (NLP) research advancement, we find data scarcity. Resources in Indonesian languages, especially the local ones, are extremely scarce and underrepresented. Many Indonesian researchers do not publish their dataset. Furthermore, the few public datasets that we have are scattered across different platforms, thus makes performing reproducible and data-centric research in Indonesian NLP even more arduous. Rising to this challenge, we initiate the first Indonesian NLP crowdsourcing effort, NusaCrowd. NusaCrowd strives to provide the largest datasheets aggregation with standardized data loading for NLP tasks in all Indonesian languages. By enabling open and centralized access to Indonesian NLP resources, we hope NusaCrowd can tackle the data scarcity problem hindering NLP progress in Indonesia and bring NLP practitioners to move towards collaboration.

Two-Stage Classifier for COVID-19 Misinformation Detection Using BERT: a Study on Indonesian Tweets

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused globally significant impacts since the beginning of 2020. This brought a lot of confusion to society, especially due to the spread of misinformation through social media. Although there were already several studies related to the detection of misinformation in social media data, most studies focused on the English dataset. Research on COVID-19 misinformation detection in Indonesia is still scarce. Therefore, through this research, we collect and annotate datasets for Indonesian and build prediction models for detecting COVID-19 misinformation by considering the tweet's relevance. The dataset construction is carried out by a team of annotators who labeled the relevance and misinformation of the tweet data. In this study, we propose the two-stage classifier model using IndoBERT pre-trained language model for the Tweet misinformation detection task. We also experiment with several other baseline models for text classification. The experimental results show that the combination of the BERT sequence classifier for relevance prediction and Bi-LSTM for misinformation detection outperformed other machine learning models with an accuracy of 87.02%. Overall, the BERT utilization contributes to the higher performance of most prediction models. We release a high-quality COVID-19 misinformation Tweet corpus in the Indonesian language, indicated by the high inter-annotator agreement.

NusaX: Multilingual Parallel Sentiment Dataset for 10 Indonesian Local Languages

Natural language processing (NLP) has a significant impact on society via technologies such as machine translation and search engines. Despite its success, NLP technology is only widely available for high-resource languages such as English and Chinese, while it remains inaccessible to many languages due to the unavailability of data resources and benchmarks. In this work, we focus on developing resources for languages in Indonesia. Despite being the second most linguistically diverse country, most languages in Indonesia are categorized as endangered and some are even extinct. We develop the first-ever parallel resource for 10 low-resource languages in Indonesia. Our resource includes datasets, a multi-task benchmark, and lexicons, as well as a parallel Indonesian-English dataset. We provide extensive analyses and describe the challenges when creating such resources. We hope that our work can spark NLP research on Indonesian and other underrepresented languages.

One Country, 700+ Languages: NLP Challenges for Underrepresented Languages and Dialects in Indonesia

NLP research is impeded by a lack of resources and awareness of the challenges presented by underrepresented languages and dialects. Focusing on the languages spoken in Indonesia, the second most linguistically diverse and the fourth most populous nation of the world, we provide an overview of the current state of NLP research for Indonesia's 700+ languages. We highlight challenges in Indonesian NLP and how these affect the performance of current NLP systems. Finally, we provide general recommendations to help develop NLP technology not only for languages of Indonesia but also other underrepresented languages.

ITTC @ TREC 2021 Clinical Trials Track

This paper describes the submissions of the Natural Language Processing (NLP) team from the Australian Research Council Industrial Transformation Training Centre (ITTC) for Cognitive Computing in Medical Technologies to the TREC 2021 Clinical Trials Track. The task focuses on the problem of matching eligible clinical trials to topics constituting a summary of a patient's admission notes. We explore different ways of representing trials and topics using NLP techniques, and then use a common retrieval model to generate the ranked list of relevant trials for each topic. The results from all our submitted runs are well above the median scores for all topics, but there is still plenty of scope for improvement.

IndoNLI: A Natural Language Inference Dataset for Indonesian

We present IndoNLI, the first human-elicited NLI dataset for Indonesian. We adapt the data collection protocol for MNLI and collect nearly 18K sentence pairs annotated by crowd workers and experts. The expert-annotated data is used exclusively as a test set. It is designed to provide a challenging test-bed for Indonesian NLI by explicitly incorporating various linguistic phenomena such as numerical reasoning, structural changes, idioms, or temporal and spatial reasoning. Experiment results show that XLM-R outperforms other pre-trained models in our data. The best performance on the expert-annotated data is still far below human performance (13.4% accuracy gap), suggesting that this test set is especially challenging. Furthermore, our analysis shows that our expert-annotated data is more diverse and contains fewer annotation artifacts than the crowd-annotated data. We hope this dataset can help accelerate progress in Indonesian NLP research.

Semi-Supervised Low-Resource Style Transfer of Indonesian Informal to Formal Language with Iterative Forward-Translation

In its daily use, the Indonesian language is riddled with informality, that is, deviations from the standard in terms of vocabulary, spelling, and word order. On the other hand, current available Indonesian NLP models are typically developed with the standard Indonesian in mind. In this work, we address a style-transfer from informal to formal Indonesian as a low-resource machine translation problem. We build a new dataset of parallel sentences of informal Indonesian and its formal counterpart. We benchmark several strategies to perform style transfer from informal to formal Indonesian. We also explore augmenting the training set with artificial forward-translated data. Since we are dealing with an extremely low-resource setting, we find that a phrase-based machine translation approach outperforms the Transformer-based approach. Alternatively, a pre-trained GPT-2 fined-tuned to this task performed equally well but costs more computational resource. Our findings show a promising step towards leveraging machine translation models for style transfer. Our code and data are available in https://github.com/haryoa/stif-indonesia