In plain words: A set of 23,659 sentence pairs, human-translated into six languages, tests whether a system can tell when two sentences mean the same thing despite shuffled wording. A model pre-trained on many languages and trained on English plus machine-translated pairs beat the next best by 23%.
Abstract · PAWS-X: A Cross-lingual Adversarial Dataset for Paraphrase Identification
Most existing work on adversarial data generation focuses on English. For example, PAWS (Paraphrase Adversaries from Word Scrambling) consists of challenging English paraphrase identification pairs from Wikipedia and Quora. We remedy this gap with PAWS-X, a new dataset of 23,659 human translated PAWS evaluation pairs in six typologically distinct languages: French, Spanish, German, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. We provide baseline numbers for three models with different capacity to capture non-local context and sentence structure, and using different multilingual training and evaluation regimes. Multilingual BERT fine-tuned on PAWS English plus machine-translated data performs the best, with a range of 83.1-90.8 accuracy across the non-English languages and an average accuracy gain of 23% over the next best model. PAWS-X shows the effectiveness of deep, multilingual pre-training while also leaving considerable headroom as a new challenge to drive multilingual research that better captures structure and contextual information.
Yinfei Yang, Yuan Zhang, Chris Tar, Jason Baldridge
arXiv:1908.11828 · cs.CL · submitted Aug 30, 2019
abstract · pdf · html · Accepted by EMNLP2019