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Scientific publication

Superlim: A Swedish Language Understanding Evaluation Benchmark

Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Authored by: Aleksandrs Berdicevskis (Språkbanken Text, University of Gothenburg) Gerlof Bouma (Språkbanken Text, University of Gothenburg) Robin Kurtz (KBLab, National Library of Sweden) Felix Morger (Språkbanken Text, University of Gothenburg) Joey Öhman (Embark Studios) Yvonne Adesam (Språkbanken Text, University of Gothenburg) Lars Borin (Språkbanken Text, University of Gothenburg) Dana Dannélls (Språkbanken Text, University of Gothenburg) Markus Forsberg (Språkbanken Text, University of Gothenburg) Tim Isbister (AI Sweden) Anna Lindahl (Språkbanken Text, University of Gothenburg) Martin Malmsten (KBLab, National Library of Sweden) Faton Rekathati (KBLab, National Library of Sweden) Magnus Sahlgren (AI Sweden) Elena Volodina (Språkbanken Text, University of Gothenburg) Love Börjeson (KBLab, National Library of Sweden) Simon Hengchen (iguanodon.ai) Nina Tahmasebi (University of Gothenburg)
NLP or Computational linguistics

We present Superlim, a multi-task NLP benchmark and analysis platform for evaluating Swedish language models, a counterpart to the English-language (Super)GLUE suite. We describe the dataset, the tasks, the leaderboard and report the baseline results yielded by a reference implementation. The tested models do not approach ceiling performance on any of the tasks, which suggests that Superlim is truly difficult, a desirable quality for a benchmark. We address methodological challenges, such as mitigating the Anglocentric bias when creating datasets for a less-resourced language; choosing the most appropriate measures; documenting the datasets and making the leaderboard convenient and transparent. We also highlight other potential usages of the dataset, such as, for instance, the evaluation of cross-lingual transfer learning.