BenLLM-Eval: A Comprehensive Evaluation into the Potentials and Pitfalls of Large Language Models on Bengali NLP

Mohsinul Kabir, Mohammed Saidul Islam, Md Tahmid Rahman Laskar, Mir Tafseer Nayeem, M Saiful Bari, Enamul Hoque


Abstract
Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as one of the most important breakthroughs in natural language processing (NLP) for their impressive skills in language generation and other language-specific tasks. Though LLMs have been evaluated in various tasks, mostly in English, they have not yet undergone thorough evaluation in under-resourced languages such as Bengali (Bangla). To this end, this paper introduces BenLLM-Eval, which consists of a comprehensive evaluation of LLMs to benchmark their performance in the low-resourced Bangla language. In this regard, we select various important and diverse Bangla NLP tasks, such as text summarization, question answering, paraphrasing, natural language inference, text classification, and sentiment analysis for zero-shot evaluation of popular LLMs, namely, ChatGPT, LLaMA-2, and Claude-2. Our experimental results demonstrate that while in some Bangla NLP tasks, zero-shot LLMs could achieve performance on par, or even better than current SOTA fine-tuned models; in most tasks, their performance is quite poor (with the performance of open-source LLMs like LLaMA-2 being significantly bad) in comparison to the current SOTA results. Therefore, it calls for further efforts to develop a better understanding of LLMs in low-resource languages like Bangla.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.201
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
2238–2252
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.201
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Mohsinul Kabir, Mohammed Saidul Islam, Md Tahmid Rahman Laskar, Mir Tafseer Nayeem, M Saiful Bari, and Enamul Hoque. 2024. BenLLM-Eval: A Comprehensive Evaluation into the Potentials and Pitfalls of Large Language Models on Bengali NLP. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 2238–2252, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
BenLLM-Eval: A Comprehensive Evaluation into the Potentials and Pitfalls of Large Language Models on Bengali NLP (Kabir et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.201.pdf