XCOPA: A Multilingual Dataset for Causal Commonsense Reasoning

Edoardo Maria Ponti, Goran Glavaš, Olga Majewska, Qianchu Liu, Ivan Vulić, Anna Korhonen


Abstract
In order to simulate human language capacity, natural language processing systems must be able to reason about the dynamics of everyday situations, including their possible causes and effects. Moreover, they should be able to generalise the acquired world knowledge to new languages, modulo cultural differences. Advances in machine reasoning and cross-lingual transfer depend on the availability of challenging evaluation benchmarks. Motivated by both demands, we introduce Cross-lingual Choice of Plausible Alternatives (XCOPA), a typologically diverse multilingual dataset for causal commonsense reasoning in 11 languages, which includes resource-poor languages like Eastern Apurímac Quechua and Haitian Creole. We evaluate a range of state-of-the-art models on this novel dataset, revealing that the performance of current methods based on multilingual pretraining and zero-shot fine-tuning falls short compared to translation-based transfer. Finally, we propose strategies to adapt multilingual models to out-of-sample resource-lean languages where only a small corpus or a bilingual dictionary is available, and report substantial improvements over the random baseline. The XCOPA dataset is freely available at github.com/cambridgeltl/xcopa.
Anthology ID:
2020.emnlp-main.185
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Bonnie Webber, Trevor Cohn, Yulan He, Yang Liu
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2362–2376
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.185
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.185
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Edoardo Maria Ponti, Goran Glavaš, Olga Majewska, Qianchu Liu, Ivan Vulić, and Anna Korhonen. 2020. XCOPA: A Multilingual Dataset for Causal Commonsense Reasoning. In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), pages 2362–2376, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
XCOPA: A Multilingual Dataset for Causal Commonsense Reasoning (Ponti et al., EMNLP 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.185.pdf
Code
 cambridgeltl/xcopa
Data
XCOPACOPAMLQAPAWS-XPanlexWSCXNLIXQuAD