We introduce GEM, a living benchmark for natural language Generation (NLG), its Evaluation, and Metrics. Measuring progress in NLG relies on a constantly evolving ecosystem of automated metrics, datasets, and human evaluation standards. Due to this moving target, new models often still evaluate on divergent anglo-centric corpora with wellestablished, but flawed, metrics. This disconnect makes it challenging to identify the limitations of current models and opportunities for progress. Addressing this limitation, GEM provides an environment in which models can easily be applied to a wide set of tasks and in which evaluation strategies can be tested. Regular updates to the benchmark will help NLG research become more multilingual and evolve the challenge alongside models. This paper serves as the description of the data for which we are organizing a shared task at our ACL 2021 Workshop and to which we invite the entire NLG community to participate.

@inproceedings{gehrmann-etal-2022-gemv2,
    title = "{GEM}v2: Multilingual {NLG} Benchmarking in a Single Line of Code",
    author = "Gehrmann, Sebastian  and
      Bhattacharjee, Abhik  and
      Mahendiran, Abinaya  and
      Wang, Alex  and
      Papangelis, Alexandros  and
      Madaan, Aman  and
      Mcmillan-major, Angelina  and
      Shvets, Anna  and
      Upadhyay, Ashish  and
      Bohnet, Bernd",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations",
    month = dec,
    year = "2022",
    address = "Abu Dhabi, UAE",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-demos.27",
    pages = "266--281",
    abstract = "Evaluations in machine learning rarely use the latest metrics, datasets, or human evaluation in favor of remaining compatible with prior work. The compatibility, often facilitated through leaderboards, thus leads to outdated but standardized evaluation practices. We pose that the standardization is taking place in the wrong spot. Evaluation infrastructure should enable researchers to use the latest methods and what should be standardized instead is how to incorporate these new evaluation advances.We introduce GEMv2, the new version of the Generation, Evaluation, and Metrics Benchmark which uses a modular infrastructure for dataset, model, and metric developers to benefit from each other{'}s work. GEMv2 supports 40 documented datasets in 51 languages, ongoing online evaluation for all datasets, and our interactive tools make it easier to add new datasets to the living benchmark.",
}

In this work, we present BanglaParaphrase, a high-quality synthetic Bangla Paraphrase dataset curated by a novel filtering pipeline. We aim to take a step towards alleviating the low resource status of the Bangla language in the NLP domain through the introduction of BanglaParaphrase, which ensures quality by preserving both semantics and diversity, making it particularly useful to enhance other Bangla datasets. We show a detailed comparative analysis between our dataset and models trained on it with other existing works to establish the viability of our synthetic paraphrase data generation pipeline. We are making the dataset and models publicly available at https://github.com/csebuetnlp/banglaparaphrase to further the state of Bangla NLP.

@inproceedings{akil-etal-2022-banglaparaphrase,
    title = "{B}angla{P}araphrase: A High-Quality {B}angla Paraphrase Dataset",
    author = "Akil, Ajwad  and
      Sultana, Najrin  and
      Bhattacharjee, Abhik  and
      Shahriyar, Rifat",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2nd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 12th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 2: Short Papers)",
    month = nov,
    year = "2022",
    address = "Online only",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2022.aacl-short.33",
    pages = "261--272",
    abstract = "In this work, we present BanglaParaphrase, a high-quality synthetic Bangla Paraphrase dataset curated by a novel filtering pipeline. We aim to take a step towards alleviating the low resource status of the Bangla language in the NLP domain through the introduction of BanglaParaphrase, which ensures quality by preserving both semantics and diversity, making it particularly useful to enhance other Bangla datasets. We show a detailed comparative analysis between our dataset and models trained on it with other existing works to establish the viability of our synthetic paraphrase data generation pipeline. We are making the dataset and models publicly available at https://github.com/csebuetnlp/banglaparaphrase to further the state of Bangla NLP.",
}

We present CrossSum, a large-scale dataset comprising 1.65 million cross-lingual article-summary samples in 1500+ language-pairs constituting 45 languages. We use the multilingual XL-Sum dataset and align identical articles written in different languages via cross-lingual retrieval using a language-agnostic representation model. We propose a multi-stage data sampling algorithm and fine-tune mT5, a multilingual pretrained model, with explicit cross-lingual supervision with CrossSum and introduce a new metric for evaluating cross-lingual summarization. Results on established and our proposed metrics indicate that models fine-tuned on CrossSum outperforms summarization+translation baselines, even when the source and target language pairs are linguistically distant. To the best of our knowledge, CrossSum is the largest cross-lingual summarization dataset and also the first-ever that does not rely on English as the pivot language. We are releasing the dataset, alignment and training scripts, and the models to spur future research on cross-lingual abstractive summarization. The resources can be found at https://github.com/csebuetnlp/CrossSum.

@inproceedings{bhattacharjee-etal-2023-crosssum,
    title = "{C}ross{S}um: Beyond {E}nglish-Centric Cross-Lingual Summarization for 1,500+ Language Pairs",
    author = "Bhattacharjee, Abhik  and
      Hasan, Tahmid  and
      Ahmad, Wasi Uddin  and
      Li, Yuan-Fang  and
      Kang, Yong-Bin  and
      Shahriyar, Rifat",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2023",
    address = "Toronto, Canada",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.143",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.143",
    pages = "2541--2564",
    abstract = "We present CrossSum, a large-scale cross-lingual summarization dataset comprising 1.68 million article-summary samples in 1,500+ language pairs. We create CrossSum by aligning parallel articles written in different languages via cross-lingual retrieval from a multilingual abstractive summarization dataset and perform a controlled human evaluation to validate its quality. We propose a multistage data sampling algorithm to effectively train a cross-lingual summarization model capable of summarizing an article in any target language. We also introduce LaSE, an embedding-based metric for automatically evaluating model-generated summaries. LaSE is strongly correlated with ROUGE and, unlike ROUGE, can be reliably measured even in the absence of references in the target language. Performance on ROUGE and LaSE indicate that our proposed model consistently outperforms baseline models. To the best of our knowledge, CrossSum is the largest cross-lingual summarization dataset and the first ever that is not centered around English. We are releasing the dataset, training and evaluation scripts, and models to spur future research on cross-lingual summarization. The resources can be found at https://github.com/csebuetnlp/CrossSum",
}

In this work, we introduce BanglaBERT, a BERT-based Natural Language Understanding (NLU) model pretrained in Bangla, a widely spoken yet low-resource language in the NLP literature. To pretrain BanglaBERT, we collect 27.5 GB of Bangla pretraining data (dubbed'Bangla2B+') by crawling 110 popular Bangla sites. We introduce two downstream task datasets on natural language inference and question answering and benchmark on four diverse NLU tasks covering text classification, sequence labeling, and span prediction. In the process, we bring them under the first-ever Bangla Language Understanding Benchmark (BLUB). BanglaBERT achieves state-of-the-art results outperforming multilingual and monolingual models. We are making the models, datasets, and a leaderboard publicly available at https://github.com/csebuetnlp/banglabert to advance Bangla NLP .

@inproceedings{bhattacharjee-etal-2022-banglabert,
title = {BanglaBERT: Lagnuage Model Pretraining and Benchmarks for Low-Resource Language Understanding Evaluation in Bangla},
author = "Bhattacharjee, Abhik and
Hasan, Tahmid and
Uddin, Wasi Ahmad and
Mubasshir, Kazi and
Islam, Md. Saiful and
Iqbal, Anindya and
Rahman, M. Sohel and
Shahriyar, Rifat",
booktitle = "Findings of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2022",
month = july,
year = {2022},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.00204}
}

Contemporary works on abstractive text summarization have focused primarily on high-resource languages like English, mostly due to the limited availability of datasets for low/mid-resource ones. In this work, we present XL-Sum, a comprehensive and diverse dataset comprising 1 million professionally annotated article-summary pairs from BBC, extracted using a set of carefully designed heuristics. The dataset covers 44 languages ranging from low to high-resource, for many of which no public dataset is currently available. XL-Sum is highly abstractive, concise, and of high quality, as indicated by human and intrinsic evaluation. We fine-tune mT5, a state-of-the-art pretrained multilingual model, with XL-Sum and experiment on multilingual and low-resource summarization tasks. XL-Sum induces competitive results compared to the ones obtained using similar monolingual datasets: we show higher than 11 ROUGE-2 scores on 10 languages we benchmark on, with some of them exceeding 15, as obtained by multilingual training. Additionally, training on low-resource languages individually also provides competitive performance. To the best of our knowledge, XL-Sum is the largest abstractive summarization dataset in terms of the number of samples collected from a single source and the number of languages covered. We are releasing our dataset and models to encourage future research on multilingual abstractive summarization. The resources can be found at https://github.com/csebuetnlp/xl-sum.

@inproceedings{hasan-etal-2021-xl,
title = "{XL}-Sum: Large-Scale Multilingual Abstractive Summarization for 44 Languages",
author = "Hasan, Tahmid and
Bhattacharjee, Abhik and
Islam, Md. Saiful and
Mubasshir, Kazi and
Li, Yuan-Fang and
Kang, Yong-Bin and
Rahman, M. Sohel and
Shahriyar, Rifat",
booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2021",
month = aug,
year = "2021",
address = "Online",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2021.findings-acl.413",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2021.findings-acl.413",
pages = "4693--4703",
}

Despite being the seventh most widely spoken language in the world, Bengali has received much less attention in machine translation literature due to being low in resources. Most publicly available parallel corpora for Bengali are not large enough; and have rather poor quality, mostly because of incorrect sentence alignments resulting from erroneous sentence segmentation, and also because of a high volume of noise present in them. In this work, we build a customized sentence segmenter for Bengali and propose two novel methods for parallel corpus creation on low-resource setups: aligner ensembling and batch filtering. With the segmenter and the two methods combined, we compile a high-quality Bengali-English parallel corpus comprising of 2.75 million sentence pairs, more than 2 million of which were not available before. Training on neural models, we achieve an improvement of more than 9 BLEU score over previous approaches to Bengali-English machine translation. We also evaluate on a new test set of 1000 pairs made with extensive quality control. We release the segmenter, parallel corpus, and the evaluation set, thus elevating Bengali from its low-resource status. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first ever large scale study on Bengali-English machine translation. We believe our study will pave the way for future research on Bengali-English machine translation as well as other low-resource languages. Our data and code are available at https://github.com/csebuetnlp/banglanmt.

@inproceedings{hasan-etal-2020-low,
title = "Not Low-Resource Anymore: Aligner Ensembling, Batch Filtering, and New Datasets for {B}engali-{E}nglish Machine Translation",
author = "Hasan, Tahmid and
Bhattacharjee, Abhik and
Samin, Kazi and
Hasan, Masum and
Basak, Madhusudan and
Rahman, M. Sohel and
Shahriyar, Rifat",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)",
month = nov,
year = "2020",
address = "Online",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.207",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.207",
pages = "2612--2623",
}

This work presents BanglaNLG, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating natural language generation (NLG) models in Bangla, a widely spoken yet low-resource language in the web domain. We aggregate three challenging conditional text generation tasks under the BanglaNLG benchmark. Then, using a clean corpus of 27.5 GB of Bangla data, we pretrain BanglaT5, a sequence-to-sequence Transformer model for Bangla. BanglaT5 achieves state-of-the-art performance in all of these tasks, outperforming mT5 (base) by up to 5.4%. We are making the BanglaT5 language model and a leaderboard publicly available in the hope of advancing future research and evaluation on Bangla NLG. The resources can be found at https://github.com/csebuetnlp/BanglaNLG.

@inproceedings{bhattacharjee-etal-2023-banglanlg,
    title = "{B}angla{NLG} and {B}angla{T}5: Benchmarks and Resources for Evaluating Low-Resource Natural Language Generation in {B}angla",
    author = "Bhattacharjee, Abhik  and
      Hasan, Tahmid  and
      Ahmad, Wasi Uddin  and
      Shahriyar, Rifat",
    booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2023",
    month = may,
    year = "2023",
    address = "Dubrovnik, Croatia",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-eacl.54",
    pages = "726--735",
    abstract = "This work presents {`}BanglaNLG,{'} a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating natural language generation (NLG) models in Bangla, a widely spoken yet low-resource language. We aggregate six challenging conditional text generation tasks under the BanglaNLG benchmark, introducing a new dataset on dialogue generation in the process. Furthermore, using a clean corpus of 27.5 GB of Bangla data, we pretrain {`}BanglaT5{'}, a sequence-to-sequence Transformer language model for Bangla. BanglaT5 achieves state-of-the-art performance in all of these tasks, outperforming several multilingual models by up to 9{\%} absolute gain and 32{\%} relative gain. We are making the new dialogue dataset and the BanglaT5 model publicly available at https://github.com/csebuetnlp/BanglaNLG in the hope of advancing future research on Bangla NLG.",
}