Christine Kock


2024

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SemRel2024: A Collection of Semantic Textual Relatedness Datasets for 13 Languages
Nedjma Ousidhoum | Shamsuddeen Muhammad | Mohamed Abdalla | Idris Abdulmumin | Ibrahim Ahmad | Sanchit Ahuja | Alham Aji | Vladimir Araujo | Abinew Ayele | Pavan Baswani | Meriem Beloucif | Chris Biemann | Sofia Bourhim | Christine Kock | Genet Dekebo | Oumaima Hourrane | Gopichand Kanumolu | Lokesh Madasu | Samuel Rutunda | Manish Shrivastava | Thamar Solorio | Nirmal Surange | Hailegnaw Tilaye | Krishnapriya Vishnubhotla | Genta Winata | Seid Yimam | Saif Mohammad
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024

Exploring and quantifying semantic relatedness is central to representing language and holds significant implications across various NLP tasks. While earlier NLP research primarily focused on semantic similarity, often within the English language context, we instead investigate the broader phenomenon of semantic relatedness. In this paper, we present SemRel, a new semantic relatedness dataset collection annotated by native speakers across 13 languages: Afrikaans, Algerian Arabic, Amharic, English, Hausa, Hindi, Indonesian, Kinyarwanda, Marathi, Moroccan Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic, Spanish, and Telugu. These languages originate from five distinct language families and are predominantly spoken in Africa and Asia – regions characterised by a relatively limited availability of NLP resources. Each instance in the SemRel datasets is a sentence pair associated with a score that represents the degree of semantic textual relatedness between the two sentences. The scores are obtained using a comparative annotation framework. We describe the data collection and annotation processes, challenges when building the datasets, baseline experiments, and their impact and utility in NLP.