Chinese Morpheme-informed Evaluation of Large Language Models

Yaqi Yin, Yue Wang, Yang Liu


Abstract
Previous evaluations of large language models (LLMs) focused on the perspective of various tasks or abilities. In this paper, we propose to evaluate from a linguistic viewpoint and argue that morpheme, a potential linguistic feature that captures both word-formation and lexical semantics, is another suitable component for evaluation that remains largely unexplored. In light of this, we construct MorphEval, a morpheme-informed benchmark, including three datasets following the bottom-up levels of characters, words, and sentences in Chinese, and then evaluate representative LLMs with both zero- and few-shot settings under two metrics. From this perspective, we reveal three aspects of issues LLMs nowadays encounter: dysfunctions in morphology and syntax, challenges with the long-tailed distribution of semantics, and difficulties from cultural implications. In these scenarios, even a smaller Chinese-targeted model may outperform ChatGPT, highlighting the actual challenges LLMs face and the necessity of language-specific improvements when applied to non-English languages. This new approach could also help guide model enhancements as well as get extended to other languages.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.281
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
3165–3178
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.281
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yaqi Yin, Yue Wang, and Yang Liu. 2024. Chinese Morpheme-informed Evaluation of Large Language Models. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 3165–3178, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
Chinese Morpheme-informed Evaluation of Large Language Models (Yin et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-5/2024.lrec-main.281.pdf