Md Tawkat Islam Khondaker


2022

pdf
A Benchmark Study of Contrastive Learning for Arabic Social Meaning
Md Tawkat Islam Khondaker | El Moatez Billah Nagoudi | AbdelRahim Elmadany | Muhammad Abdul-Mageed | Laks Lakshmanan, V.S.
Proceedings of the The Seventh Arabic Natural Language Processing Workshop (WANLP)

Contrastive learning (CL) has brought significant progress to various NLP tasks. Despite such a progress, CL has not been applied to Arabic NLP. Nor is it clear how much benefits it could bring to particular classes of tasks such as social meaning (e.g., sentiment analysis, dialect identification, hate speech detection). In this work, we present a comprehensive benchmark study of state-of-the-art supervised CL methods on a wide array of Arabic social meaning tasks. Through an extensive empirical analysis, we show that CL methods outperform vanilla finetuning on most of the tasks. We also show that CL can be data efficient and quantify this efficiency, demonstrating the promise of these methods in low-resource settings vis-a-vis the particular downstream tasks (especially label granularity).