Abstract

Despite the progress made in recent years in addressing natural language understanding (NLU) challenges, the majority of this progress remains to be concentrated on resource-rich languages like English. This work focuses on Persian language, one of the widely spoken languages in the world, and yet there are few NLU datasets available for this language. The availability of high-quality evaluation datasets is a necessity for reliable assessment of the progress on different NLU tasks and domains. We introduce ParsiNLU, the first benchmark in Persian language that includes a range of language understanding tasks—reading comprehension, textual entailment, and so on. These datasets are collected in a multitude of ways, often involving manual annotations by native speakers. This results in over 14.5k new instances across 6 distinct NLU tasks. Additionally, we present the first results on state-of-the-art …

Date

2021

Authors

Daniel Khashabi, Arman Cohan, Siamak Shakeri, Pedram Hosseini, Pouya Pezeshkpour, Malihe Alikhani, Moin Aminnaseri, Marzieh Bitaab, Faeze Brahman, Sarik Ghazarian, Mozhdeh Gheini, Arman Kabiri, Rabeeh Karimi Mahabagdi, Omid Memarrast, Ahmadreza Mosallanezhad, Erfan Noury, Shahab Raji, Mohammad Sadegh Rasooli, Sepideh Sadeghi, Erfan Sadeqi Azer, Niloofar Safi Samghabadi, Mahsa Shafaei, Saber Sheybani, Ali Tazarv, Yadollah Yaghoobzadeh

Journal

Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Volume

9

Pages

1147-1162

Publisher

MIT Press