JamPatoisNLI: A Jamaican Patois Natural Language Inference Dataset

Ruth-Ann Armstrong, John Hewitt, Christopher Manning


Abstract
JamPatoisNLI provides the first dataset for natural language inference in a creole language, Jamaican Patois.Many of the most-spoken low-resource languages are creoles. These languages commonly have a lexicon derived from a major world language and a distinctive grammar reflecting the languages of the original speakers and the process of language birth by creolization. This gives them a distinctive place in exploring the effectiveness of transfer from large monolingual or multilingual pretrained models. While our work, along with previous work, shows that transfer from these models to low-resource languages that are unrelated to languages in their training set is not very effective, we would expect stronger results from transfer to creoles. Indeed, our experiments show considerably better results from few-shot learning of JamPatoisNLI than for such unrelated languages, and help us begin to understand how the unique relationship between creoles and their high-resource base languages affect cross-lingual transfer. JamPatoisNLI, which consists of naturally-occurring premises and expert-written hypotheses, is a step towards steering research into a traditionally underserved language and a useful benchmark for understanding cross-lingual NLP.
Anthology ID:
2022.findings-emnlp.389
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022
Month:
December
Year:
2022
Address:
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Editors:
Yoav Goldberg, Zornitsa Kozareva, Yue Zhang
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5307–5320
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.findings-emnlp.389
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.findings-emnlp.389
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ruth-Ann Armstrong, John Hewitt, and Christopher Manning. 2022. JamPatoisNLI: A Jamaican Patois Natural Language Inference Dataset. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022, pages 5307–5320, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
JamPatoisNLI: A Jamaican Patois Natural Language Inference Dataset (Armstrong et al., Findings 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.findings-emnlp.389.pdf
Dataset:
 2022.findings-emnlp.389.dataset.zip
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2022.findings-emnlp.389.mp4