Question Answering (QA) datasets have been instrumental in developing and evaluating Large Language Model (LLM) capabilities. However, such datasets are scarce for languages other than English due to the cost and difficulties of collection and manual annotation. This means that producing novel models and measuring the performance of multilingual LLMs in low-resource languages is challenging. To mitigate this, we propose SynDARin, a method for generating and validating QA datasets for low-resoucre languages. We utilize parallel content mining to obtain human-curated paragraphs between English and the target language. We use the English data as context to generate synthetic multiple-choice (MC) question-answer pairs, which are automatically translated and further validated for quality. Combining these with their designated non-English human-curated paragraphs form the final QA dataset. The method allows to maintain content quality, reduces the likelihood of factual errors, and circumvents the need for costly annotation. To test the method, we created a QA dataset with 1.2K samples for the Armenian language. The human evaluation shows that 98% of the generated English data maintains quality and diversity in the question types and topics, while the translation validation pipeline can filter out ~70% of data with poor quality. We use the dataset to benchmark state-of-the-art LLMs, showing their inability to achieve human accuracy with some model performances closer to random chance. This shows that the generated dataset is non-trivial and can be used to evaluate reasoning capabilities in low-resource language.

Recent studies of the emergent capabilities of transformer-based Natural Language Understanding (NLU) models have indicated that they have an understanding of lexical and compositional semantics. We provide evidence that suggests these claims should be taken with a grain of salt: we find that state-of-the-art Natural Language Inference (NLI) models are sensitive towards minor semantics preserving surface-form variations, which lead to sizable inconsistent model decisions during inference. Notably, this behaviour differs from valid and in-depth comprehension of compositional semantics, however does neither emerge when evaluating model accuracy on standard benchmarks nor when probing for syntactic, monotonic, and logically robust reasoning. We propose a novel framework to measure the extent of semantic sensitivity. To this end, we evaluate NLI models on adversarially generated examples containing minor semantics-preserving surface-form input noise. This is achieved using conditional text generation, with the explicit condition that the NLI model predicts the relationship between the original and adversarial inputs as a symmetric equivalence entailment. We systematically study the effects of the phenomenon across NLI models for in- and out-of- domain settings. Our experiments show that semantic sensitivity causes performance degradations of 12.92% and 23.71% average over in- and out-of- domain settings, respectively. We further perform ablation studies, analysing this phenomenon across models, datasets, and variations in inference and show that semantic sensitivity can lead to major inconsistency within model predictions.

The task of Stance Detection is concerned with identifying the attitudes expressed by an author towards a target of interest. This task spans a variety of domains ranging from social media opinion identification to detecting the stance for a legal claim. However, the framing of the task varies within these domains in terms of the data collection protocol, the label dictionary and the number of available annotations. Furthermore, these stance annotations are significantly imbalanced on a per-topic and inter-topic basis. These make multi-domain stance detection challenging, requiring standardization and domain adaptation. To overcome this challenge, we propose Topic Efficient StancE Detection (TESTED), consisting of a topic-guided diversity sampling technique used for creating a multi-domain data efficient training set and a contrastive objective that is used for fine-tuning a stance classifier using the produced set. We evaluate the method on an existing benchmark of 16 datasets with in-domain, i.e. all topics seen and out-of-domain, i.e. unseen topics, experiments. The results show that the method outperforms the state-of-the-art with an average of 3.5 F1 points increase in-domain and is more generalizable with an averaged 10.2 F1 on out-of-domain evaluation while using <10% of the training data. We show that our sampling technique mitigates both inter- and per-topic class imbalances. Finally, our analysis demonstrates that the contrastive learning objective allows the model for a more pronounced segmentation of samples with varying labels.