We present Superlim, a multi-task NLP benchmark and analysis platform for evaluating Swedish language models, a counterpart to the English-language (Super)GLUE suite. We describe the dataset, the tasks, the leaderboard and report the baseline results yielded by a reference implementation. The tested models do not approach ceiling performance on any of the tasks, which suggests that Superlim is truly difficult, a desirable quality for a benchmark. We address methodological challenges, such as mitigating the Anglocentric bias when creating datasets for a less-resourced language; choosing the most appropriate measures; documenting the datasets and making the leaderboard convenient and transparent. We also highlight other potential usages of the dataset, such as, for instance, the evaluation of cross-lingual transfer learning.

The long-standing endeavor of relating the textual and the visual domain recently underwent a pivotal breakthrough, as OpenAI released CLIP. This model distinguishes how well an English text corresponds with a given image with unprecedented accuracy. Trained via a contrastive learning objective over a huge dataset of 400M of images and captions, it is a work that is not easily replicated, especially for low resource languages. Capitalizing on the modularization of the CLIP architecture, we propose to use cross-lingual teacher learning to re-train the textual encoder for various non-English languages. Our method requires no image data and relies entirely on machine translation which removes the need for data in the target language. We find that our method can efficiently train a new textual encoder with relatively low computational cost, whilst still outperforming previous baselines on multilingual image-text retrieval.