Generative AI models have shown impressive performance on many Natural
Language Processing tasks such as language understanding, reasoning, and
language generation. An important question being asked by the AI community
today is about the capabilities and limits of these models, and it is clear
that evaluating generative AI is very challenging. Most studies on generative
LLMs have been restricted to English and it is unclear how capable these models
are at understanding and generating text in other languages. We present the
first comprehensive benchmarking of generative LLMs - MEGA, which evaluates
models on standard NLP benchmarks, covering 16 NLP datasets across 70
typologically diverse languages. We compare the performance of generative LLMs
including Chat-GPT and GPT-4 to State of the Art (SOTA) non-autoregressive
models on these tasks to determine how well generative models perform compared
to the previous generation of LLMs. We present a thorough analysis of the
performance of models across languages and tasks and discuss challenges in
improving the performance of generative LLMs on low-resource languages. We
create a framework for evaluating generative LLMs in the multilingual setting
and provide directions for future progress in the field.Comment: EMNLP 202