SemEval Task 1: Semantic Textual Relatedness for African and Asian Languages
Nedjma Ousidhoum, Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad, Mohamed Abdalla, Idris Abdulmumin, Ibrahim Said Ahmad, Sanchit Ahuja, Alham Fikri Aji, Vladimir Araujo, Meriem Beloucif, Christine De Kock
Abstract
We present the first shared task on Semantic Textual Relatedness (STR). While earlier shared tasks primarily focused on semantic similarity, we instead investigate the broader phenomenon of semantic relatedness across 14 languages: Afrikaans, Algerian Arabic, Amharic, English, Hausa, Hindi, Indonesian, Kinyarwanda, Marathi, Moroccan Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic, Punjabi, Spanish, and Telugu. These languages originate from five distinct language families and are predominantly spoken in Africa and Asia – regions characterised by the relatively limited availability of NLP resources. Each instance in the datasets is a sentence pair associated with a score that represents the degree of semantic textual relatedness between the two sentences. Participating systems were asked to rank sentence pairs by their closeness in meaning (i.e., their degree of semantic relatedness) in the 14 languages in three main tracks: (a) supervised, (b) unsupervised, and (c) crosslingual. The task attracted 163 participants. We received 70 submissions in total (across all tasks) from 51 different teams, and 38 system description papers. We report on the best-performing systems as well as the most common and the most effective approaches for the three different tracks.- Anthology ID:
- 2024.semeval-1.272
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 18th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2024)
- Month:
- June
- Year:
- 2024
- Address:
- Mexico City, Mexico
- Editors:
- Atul Kr. Ojha, A. Seza Doğruöz, Harish Tayyar Madabushi, Giovanni Da San Martino, Sara Rosenthal, Aiala Rosá
- Venue:
- SemEval
- SIG:
- SIGLEX
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 1963–1978
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2024.semeval-1.272
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Nedjma Ousidhoum, Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad, Mohamed Abdalla, Idris Abdulmumin, Ibrahim Said Ahmad, Sanchit Ahuja, Alham Fikri Aji, Vladimir Araujo, Meriem Beloucif, and Christine De Kock. 2024. SemEval Task 1: Semantic Textual Relatedness for African and Asian Languages. In Proceedings of the 18th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2024), pages 1963–1978, Mexico City, Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- SemEval Task 1: Semantic Textual Relatedness for African and Asian Languages (Ousidhoum et al., SemEval 2024)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/jeptaln-2024-ingestion/2024.semeval-1.272.pdf