# Task-name ### Paper Title: [MELA: Multilingual Evaluation of Linguistic Acceptability](https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.09033) **Abstract**: In this work, we present the largest benchmark to date on linguistic acceptability: Multilingual Evaluation of Linguistic Acceptability -- MELA, with 46K samples covering 10 languages from a diverse set of language families. We establish LLM baselines on this benchmark, and investigate cross-lingual transfer in acceptability judgements with XLM-R. In pursuit of multilingual interpretability, we conduct probing experiments with fine-tuned XLM-R to explore the process of syntax capability acquisition. Our results show that GPT-4o exhibits a strong multilingual ability, outperforming fine-tuned XLM-R, while open-source multilingual models lag behind by a noticeable gap. Cross-lingual transfer experiments show that transfer in acceptability judgment is non-trivial: 500 Icelandic fine-tuning examples lead to 23 MCC performance in a completely unrelated language -- Chinese. Results of our probing experiments indicate that training on MELA improves the performance of XLM-R on syntax-related tasks. Homepage: https://github.com/sjtu-compling/MELA ### Citation ``` @inproceedings{zhang2023mela, author = {Ziyin Zhang and Yikang Liu and Weifang Huang and Junyu Mao and Rui Wang and Hai Hu}, title = {{MELA:} Multilingual Evaluation of Linguistic Acceptability}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), {ACL} 2024, Bangkok, Thailand}, publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics}, year = {2024}, url = {https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2311.09033} } ``` ### Groups and Tasks #### Groups - `mela`: multilingual evaluation of linguistic acceptability #### Tasks - `mela_en`: English - `mela_zh`: Chinese - `mela_it`: Italian - `mela_ru`: Russian - `mela_de`: Germany - `mela_fr`: French - `mela_es`: Spanish - `mela_ja`: Japanese - `mela_ar`: Arabic - `mela_ar`: Icelandic ### Checklist For adding novel benchmarks/datasets to the library: - [x] Is the task an existing benchmark in the literature? - [x] Have you referenced the original paper that introduced the task? - [x] If yes, does the original paper provide a reference implementation? If so, have you checked against the reference implementation and documented how to run such a test? If other tasks on this dataset are already supported: - [ ] Is the "Main" variant of this task clearly denoted? - [ ] Have you provided a short sentence in a README on what each new variant adds / evaluates? - [ ] Have you noted which, if any, published evaluation setups are matched by this variant?