The educational attainment, labour market participation and living conditions of young Roma in Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania

This paper investigates the educational attainment, labour market participation and living conditions of young Roma adults in Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania based on data from the generations and gender surveys and other sources of information. It shows that in spite of a small improvement in the educational attainment of young Roma in comparison to the generation of their parents, the educational achievement and employment gaps have increased considerably during the post-communist period. The paper also compares living conditions of the Roma with other population groups. It concludes with a discussion of policy challenges.minorities, Roma, discrimination, employment, education, transition

Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer with Meta Learning

Learning what to share between tasks has been a topic of great importance recently, as strategic sharing of knowledge has been shown to improve downstream task performance. This is particularly important for multilingual applications, as most languages in the world are under-resourced. Here, we consider the setting of training models on multiple different languages at the same time, when little or no data is available for languages other than English. We show that this challenging setup can be approached using meta-learning, where, in addition to training a source language model, another model learns to select which training instances are the most beneficial to the first. We experiment using standard supervised, zero-shot cross-lingual, as well as few-shot cross-lingual settings for different natural language understanding tasks (natural language inference, question answering). Our extensive experimental setup demonstrates the consistent effectiveness of meta-learning for a total of 15 languages. We improve upon the state-of-the-art for zero-shot and few-shot NLI (on MultiNLI and XNLI) and QA (on the MLQA dataset). A comprehensive error analysis indicates that the correlation of typological features between languages can partly explain when parameter sharing learned via meta-learning is beneficial.Comment: Accepted as long paper in EMNLP2020 main conferenc

English Machine Reading Comprehension Datasets: A Survey

This paper surveys 60 English Machine Reading Comprehension datasets, with a view to providing a convenient resource for other researchers interested in this problem. We categorize the datasets according to their question and answer form and compare them across various dimensions including size, vocabulary, data source, method of creation, human performance level, and first question word. Our analysis reveals that Wikipedia is by far the most common data source and that there is a relative lack of why, when, and where questions across datasets.Comment: Will appear at EMNLP 2021. Dataset survey paper: 9 pages, 5 figures, 2 tables + attachmen

bgGLUE: A Bulgarian General Language Understanding Evaluation Benchmark

We present bgGLUE (Bulgarian General Language Understanding Evaluation), a benchmark for evaluating language models on Natural Language Understanding (NLU) tasks in Bulgarian. Our benchmark includes NLU tasks targeting a variety of NLP problems (e.g., natural language inference, fact-checking, named entity recognition, sentiment analysis, question answering, etc.) and machine learning tasks (sequence labeling, document-level classification, and regression). We run the first systematic evaluation of pre-trained language models for Bulgarian, comparing and contrasting results across the nine tasks in the benchmark. The evaluation results show strong performance on sequence labeling tasks, but there is a lot of room for improvement for tasks that require more complex reasoning. We make bgGLUE publicly available together with the fine-tuning and the evaluation code, as well as a public leaderboard at https://bgglue.github.io/, and we hope that it will enable further advancements in developing NLU models for Bulgarian.Comment: Accepted to ACL 2023 (Main Conference

The Belebele Benchmark: a Parallel Reading Comprehension Dataset in 122 Language Variants

We present Belebele, a multiple-choice machine reading comprehension (MRC) dataset spanning 122 language variants. Significantly expanding the language coverage of natural language understanding (NLU) benchmarks, this dataset enables the evaluation of text models in high-, medium-, and low-resource languages. Each question is based on a short passage from the Flores-200 dataset and has four multiple-choice answers. The questions were carefully curated to discriminate between models with different levels of general language comprehension. The English dataset on its own proves difficult enough to challenge state-of-the-art language models. Being fully parallel, this dataset enables direct comparison of model performance across all languages. We use this dataset to evaluate the capabilities of multilingual masked language models (MLMs) and large language models (LLMs). We present extensive results and find that despite significant cross-lingual transfer in English-centric LLMs, much smaller MLMs pretrained on balanced multilingual data still understand far more languages. We also observe that larger vocabulary size and conscious vocabulary construction correlate with better performance on low-resource languages. Overall, Belebele opens up new avenues for evaluating and analyzing the multilingual capabilities of NLP systems.Comment: 27 pages, 13 figure