SemRel2024: A Collection of Semantic Textual Relatedness Datasets for 13 Languages

Nedjma Ousidhoum, Shamsuddeen Muhammad, Mohamed Abdalla, Idris Abdulmumin, Ibrahim Ahmad, Sanchit Ahuja, Alham Aji, Vladimir Araujo, Abinew Ayele, Pavan Baswani, Meriem Beloucif, Chris Biemann, Sofia Bourhim, Christine Kock, Genet Dekebo, Oumaima Hourrane, Gopichand Kanumolu, Lokesh Madasu, Samuel Rutunda, Manish Shrivastava, Thamar Solorio, Nirmal Surange, Hailegnaw Tilaye, Krishnapriya Vishnubhotla, Genta Winata, Seid Yimam, Saif Mohammad


Abstract
Exploring and quantifying semantic relatedness is central to representing language and holds significant implications across various NLP tasks. While earlier NLP research primarily focused on semantic similarity, often within the English language context, we instead investigate the broader phenomenon of semantic relatedness. In this paper, we present SemRel, a new semantic relatedness dataset collection annotated by native speakers across 13 languages: Afrikaans, Algerian Arabic, Amharic, English, Hausa, Hindi, Indonesian, Kinyarwanda, Marathi, Moroccan Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic, Spanish, and Telugu. These languages originate from five distinct language families and are predominantly spoken in Africa and Asia – regions characterised by a relatively limited availability of NLP resources. Each instance in the SemRel datasets is a sentence pair associated with a score that represents the degree of semantic textual relatedness between the two sentences. The scores are obtained using a comparative annotation framework. We describe the data collection and annotation processes, challenges when building the datasets, baseline experiments, and their impact and utility in NLP.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-acl.147
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2512–2530
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.147
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.findings-acl.147
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Nedjma Ousidhoum, Shamsuddeen Muhammad, Mohamed Abdalla, Idris Abdulmumin, Ibrahim Ahmad, Sanchit Ahuja, Alham Aji, Vladimir Araujo, Abinew Ayele, Pavan Baswani, Meriem Beloucif, Chris Biemann, Sofia Bourhim, Christine Kock, Genet Dekebo, Oumaima Hourrane, Gopichand Kanumolu, Lokesh Madasu, Samuel Rutunda, et al.. 2024. SemRel2024: A Collection of Semantic Textual Relatedness Datasets for 13 Languages. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024, pages 2512–2530, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
SemRel2024: A Collection of Semantic Textual Relatedness Datasets for 13 Languages (Ousidhoum et al., Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.147.pdf