The advent of natural language understanding (NLU) benchmarks for English, such as GLUE and SuperGLUE allows new NLU models to be evaluated across a diverse set of tasks. These comprehensive benchmarks have facilitated a broad range of research and applications in natural language processing (NLP). The problem, however, is that most such benchmarks are limited to English, which has made it difficult to replicate many of the successes in English NLU for other languages. To help remedy this issue, we introduce the first large-scale Chinese Language Understanding Evaluation (CLUE) benchmark. CLUE is an open-ended, community-driven project that brings together 9 tasks spanning several well-established single-sentence/sentence-pair classification tasks, as well as machine reading comprehension, all on original Chinese text. To establish results on these tasks, we report scores using an exhaustive set of current state-of-the-art pre-trained Chinese models (9 in total). We also introduce a number of supplementary datasets and additional tools to help facilitate further progress on Chinese NLU. Our benchmark is released at https://www.CLUEbenchmarks.com

Do state-of-the-art models for language understanding already have, or can they easily learn, abilities such as boolean coordination, quantification, conditionals, comparatives, and monotonicity reasoning (i.e., reasoning about word substitutions in sentential contexts)? While such phenomena are involved in natural language inference (NLI) and go beyond basic linguistic understanding, it is unclear the extent to which they are captured in existing NLI benchmarks and effectively learned by models. To investigate this, we propose the use of semantic fragments—systematically generated datasets that each target a different semantic phenomenon—for probing, and efficiently improving, such capabilities of linguistic models. This approach to creating challenge datasets allows direct control over the semantic diversity and complexity of the targeted linguistic phenomena, and results in a more precise characterization of a model's linguistic behavior. Our experiments, using a library of 8 such semantic fragments, reveal two remarkable findings: (a) State-of-the-art models, including BERT, that are pre-trained on existing NLI benchmark datasets perform poorly on these new fragments, even though the phenomena probed here are central to the NLI task; (b) On the other hand, with only a few minutes of additional fine-tuning—with a carefully selected learning rate and a novel variation of “inoculation”—a BERT-based model can master all of these logic and monotonicity fragments while retaining its performance on established NLI benchmarks.

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Despite the tremendous recent progress on natural language inference (NLI), driven largely by large-scale investment in new datasets (e.g., SNLI, MNLI) and advances in modeling, most progress has been limited to English due to a lack of reliable datasets for most of the world's languages. In this paper, we present the first large-scale NLI dataset (consisting of ∼56,000 annotated sentence pairs) 1 for Chinese called the Original Chinese Natural Language Inference dataset (OCNLI). Unlike recent attempts at extending NLI to other languages, our dataset does not rely on any automatic translation or non-expert annotation. Instead, we elicit annotations from native speakers specializing in linguistics. We follow closely the annotation protocol used for MNLI, but create new strategies for eliciting diverse hypotheses. We establish several baseline results on our dataset using state-of-the-art pre-trained models for Chinese, and find even the best performing models to be far outpaced by human performance (∼12% absolute performance gap), making it a challenging new resource that we hope will help to accelerate progress in Chinese natural language understanding. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first humanelicited MNLI-style corpus for a non-English language.

We present a machine learning approach to distinguish texts translated to Chinese (by humans) from texts originally written in Chinese, with a focus on a wide range of syntactic features. Using Support Vector Machines (SVMs) as classifier on a genre-balanced corpus in translation studies of Chinese, we find that constituent parse trees and dependency triples as features without lexical information perform very well on the task, with an Fmeasure above 90%, close to the results of lexical n-gram features, without the risk of learning topic information rather than translation features. Thus, we claim syntactic features alone can accurately distinguish translated from original Chinese. Translated Chinese exhibits an increased use of determiners, subject position pronouns, NP + "的" as NP modifiers, multiple NPs or VPs conjoined by "、", among other structures. We also interpret the syntactic features with reference to previous translation studies in Chinese, particularly the usage of pronouns.