Common Sense Beyond English: Evaluating and Improving Multilingual LMs for Commonsense Reasoning

This is the Github repository of our paper, "Common Sense Beyond English: Evaluating and Improving Multilingual Language Models for Commonsense Reasoning" (in Proc. of ACL2021) about MickeyProbe and X-CSR. The detailed information and the links to download our data are available on the project website: https://inklab.usc.edu/XCSR/.

Code

Herein, we show the code and scripts for running the MickeyProbe experiments (mickey_probe), X-CSR experiments (xcsr_experiments) and the proposed multilingual contrastive pre-training method (mcp_generation). Ther are instructions under each folder and please refer to our paper if you would like to know more details.

Paper Abstract

Commonsense reasoning research has so far been mainly limited to English. We aim to evaluate and improve popular multilingual language models (ML-LMs) to help advance commonsense reasoning (CSR) beyond English. We collect the Mickey Corpus, consisting of 561k sentences in 11 different languages, which can be used for analyzing and improving ML-LMs. We propose Mickey Probe, a language-agnostic probing task for fairly evaluating the common sense of popular ML-LMs across different languages. In addition, we also create two new datasets, X-CSQA and X-CODAH, by translating their English versions to 15 other languages, so that we can evaluate popular ML-LMs for cross-lingual commonsense reasoning. To improve the performance beyond English, we propose a simple yet effective method --- multilingual contrastive pre-training (MCP). It significantly enhances sentence representations, yielding a large performance gain on both benchmarks.

Resources

We provide our resources and method for studying cross-lingual commonsense reasoning.

A multi-lingual corpus for MickeyProbe task towards analyzing and pre-training ML-LMs.
Two X-CSR datasets (i.e., X-CSQA and X-CODAH) for evaluation.
The multilingual contrastive pre-training (MCP) method for improving ML-LMs' performance.

We also build X-CSR leaderboard so that people can compare their cross-lingual/multilingual models with each other in a unified evaluation protocol.

Citation

@inproceedings{lin-etal-2021-xcsr,
    title = "Common Sense Beyond English: Evaluating and Improving Multilingual Language Models for Commonsense Reasoning",
    author = "Lin, Bill Yuchen and Lee, Seyeon and Qiao, Xiaoyang and Ren, Xiang",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL-IJCNLP 2021)",
    year = "2021"
}

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