This is the way: designing and compiling LEPISZCZE, a comprehensive NLP benchmark for Polish

The availability of compute and data to train larger and larger language models increases the demand for robust methods of benchmarking the true progress of LM training. Recent years witnessed significant progress in standardized benchmarking for English. Benchmarks such as GLUE, SuperGLUE, or KILT have become de facto standard tools to compare large language models. Following the trend to replicate GLUE for other languages, the KLEJ benchmark has been released for Polish. In this paper, we evaluate the progress in benchmarking for low-resourced languages. We note that only a handful of languages have such comprehensive benchmarks. We also note the gap in the number of tasks being evaluated by benchmarks for resource-rich English/Chinese and the rest of the world. In this paper, we introduce LEPISZCZE (the Polish word for glew, the Middle English predecessor of glue), a new, comprehensive benchmark for Polish NLP with a large variety of tasks and high-quality operationalization of the benchmark. We design LEPISZCZE with flexibility in mind. Including new models, datasets, and tasks is as simple as possible while still offering data versioning and model tracking. In the first run of the benchmark, we test 13 experiments (task and dataset pairs) based on the five most recent LMs for Polish. We use five datasets from the Polish benchmark and add eight novel datasets. As the paper's main contribution, apart from LEPISZCZE, we provide insights and experiences learned while creating the benchmark for Polish as the blueprint to design similar benchmarks for other low-resourced languages.

WordNet2Vec: Corpora Agnostic Word Vectorization Method

A complex nature of big data resources demands new methods for structuring especially for textual content. WordNet is a good knowledge source for comprehensive abstraction of natural language as its good implementations exist for many languages. Since WordNet embeds natural language in the form of a complex network, a transformation mechanism WordNet2Vec is proposed in the paper. It creates vectors for each word from WordNet. These vectors encapsulate general position - role of a given word towards all other words in the natural language. Any list or set of such vectors contains knowledge about the context of its component within the whole language. Such word representation can be easily applied to many analytic tasks like classification or clustering. The usefulness of the WordNet2Vec method was demonstrated in sentiment analysis, i.e. classification with transfer learning for the real Amazon opinion textual dataset.