IndicNLPSuite: Monolingual Corpora, Evaluation Benchmarks and Pre-trained Multilingual Language Models for Indian Languages

Divyanshu Kakwani, Anoop Kunchukuttan, Satish Golla, Gokul N.C., Avik Bhattacharyya, Mitesh M. Khapra, Pratyush Kumar


Abstract
In this paper, we introduce NLP resources for 11 major Indian languages from two major language families. These resources include: (a) large-scale sentence-level monolingual corpora, (b) pre-trained word embeddings, (c) pre-trained language models, and (d) multiple NLU evaluation datasets (IndicGLUE benchmark). The monolingual corpora contains a total of 8.8 billion tokens across all 11 languages and Indian English, primarily sourced from news crawls. The word embeddings are based on FastText, hence suitable for handling morphological complexity of Indian languages. The pre-trained language models are based on the compact ALBERT model. Lastly, we compile the (IndicGLUE benchmark for Indian language NLU. To this end, we create datasets for the following tasks: Article Genre Classification, Headline Prediction, Wikipedia Section-Title Prediction, Cloze-style Multiple choice QA, Winograd NLI and COPA. We also include publicly available datasets for some Indic languages for tasks like Named Entity Recognition, Cross-lingual Sentence Retrieval, Paraphrase detection, etc. Our embeddings are competitive or better than existing pre-trained embeddings on multiple tasks. We hope that the availability of the dataset will accelerate Indic NLP research which has the potential to impact more than a billion people. It can also help the community in evaluating advances in NLP over a more diverse pool of languages. The data and models are available at https://indicnlp.ai4bharat.org.
Anthology ID:
2020.findings-emnlp.445
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020
Month:
November
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Trevor Cohn, Yulan He, Yang Liu
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4948–4961
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.findings-emnlp.445
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.findings-emnlp.445
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Divyanshu Kakwani, Anoop Kunchukuttan, Satish Golla, Gokul N.C., Avik Bhattacharyya, Mitesh M. Khapra, and Pratyush Kumar. 2020. IndicNLPSuite: Monolingual Corpora, Evaluation Benchmarks and Pre-trained Multilingual Language Models for Indian Languages. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020, pages 4948–4961, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
IndicNLPSuite: Monolingual Corpora, Evaluation Benchmarks and Pre-trained Multilingual Language Models for Indian Languages (Kakwani et al., Findings 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.findings-emnlp.445.pdf
Data
IndicCorpIndicGLUE