In the epoch of multilingual large language models (LLMs), it is still challenging to evaluate the models’ understanding of lower-resourced languages, which motivates further development of expert-crafted natural language understanding benchmarks. We introduce BelarusianGLUE — a natural language understanding benchmark for Belarusian, an East Slavic language, with ≈15K instances in five tasks: sentiment analysis, linguistic acceptability, word in context, Winograd schema challenge, textual entailment. A systematic evaluation of BERT models and LLMs against this novel benchmark reveals that both types of models approach human-level performance on easier tasks, such as sentiment analysis, but there is a significant gap in performance between machine and human on a harder task — Winograd schema challenge. We find the optimal choice of model type to be task-specific: e.g. BERT models underperform on textual entailment task but are competitive for linguistic acceptability. We release the datasets (https://hf.co/datasets/maaxap/BelarusianGLUE) and evaluation code (https://github.com/maaxap/BelarusianGLUE).

This paper presents our proposed method for SemEval-2023 Task 12, which focuses on sentiment analysis for low-resource African languages. Our method utilizes a language-centric domain adaptation approach which is based on adversarial training, where a small version of Afro-XLM-Roberta serves as a generator model and a feed-forward network as a discriminator. We participated in all three subtasks: monolingual (12 tracks), multilingual (1 track), and zero-shot (2 tracks). Our results show an improvement in weighted F1 for 13 out of 15 tracks with a maximum increase of 4.3 points for Moroccan Arabic compared to the baseline. We observed that using language family-based labels along with sequence-level input representations for the discriminator model improves the quality of the cross-lingual sentiment analysis for the languages unseen during the training. Additionally, our experimental results suggest that training the system on languages that are close in a language families tree enhances the quality of sentiment analysis for low-resource languages. Lastly, the computational complexity of the prediction step was kept at the same level which makes the approach to be interesting from a practical perspective. The code of the approach can be found in our repository.