The proliferation of transformer-based language models has revolutionized NLP domain while simultaneously introduced significant challenges regarding model transparency and trustworthiness. The complexity of achieving explainable systems in this domain is evidenced by the extensive array of explanation methods and evaluation metrics developed by researchers. To address the challenge of selecting optimal explainability approaches, we present o-mega, a hyperparameter optimization tool designed to automatically identify the most effective explainable AI methods and their configurations within the semantic matching domain. We evaluate o-mega on a post-claim matching pipeline using a curated dataset of social media posts paired with refuting claims. Our tool systematically explores different explainable methods and their hyperparameters, demonstrating improved transparency in automated fact-checking systems. As a result, such automated optimization of explanation methods can significantly enhance the interpretability of claim-matching models in critical applications such as misinformation detection, contributing to more trustworthy and transparent AI systems.

In this work, we introduce skLEP, the first comprehensive benchmark specifically designed for evaluating Slovak natural language understanding (NLU) models. We have compiled skLEP to encompass nine diverse tasks that span token-level, sentence-pair, and document-level challenges, thereby offering a thorough assessment of model capabilities. To create this benchmark, we curated new, original datasets tailored for Slovak and meticulously translated established English NLU resources. Within this paper, we also present the first systematic and extensive evaluation of a wide array of Slovak-specific, multilingual, and English pre-trained language models using the skLEP tasks. Finally, we also release the complete benchmark data, an open-source toolkit facilitating both fine-tuning and evaluation of models, and a public leaderboard at https://github.com/slovak-nlp/sklep in the hopes of fostering reproducibility and drive future research in Slovak NLU.

We introduce a new Slovak masked language model called SlovakBERT. This is to our best knowledge the first paper discussing Slovak transformers-based language models. We evaluate our model on several NLP tasks and achieve state-of-the-art results. This evaluation is likewise the first attempt to establish a benchmark for Slovak language models. We publish the masked language model, as well as the fine-tuned models for part-of-speech tagging, sentiment analysis and semantic textual similarity.