GPTAraEval: A Comprehensive Evaluation of ChatGPT on Arabic NLP

Md Tawkat Islam Khondaker, Abdul Waheed, El Moatez Billah Nagoudi, Muhammad Abdul-Mageed


Abstract
ChatGPT’s emergence heralds a transformative phase in NLP, particularly demonstrated through its excellent performance on many English benchmarks. However, the model’s efficacy across diverse linguistic contexts remains largely uncharted territory. This work aims to bridge this knowledge gap, with a primary focus on assessing ChatGPT’s capabilities on Arabic languages and dialectal varieties. Our comprehensive study conducts a large-scale automated and human evaluation of ChatGPT, encompassing 44 distinct language understanding and generation tasks on over 60 different datasets. To our knowledge, this marks the first extensive performance analysis of ChatGPT’s deployment in Arabic NLP. Our findings indicate that, despite its remarkable performance in English, ChatGPT is consistently surpassed by smaller models that have undergone finetuning on Arabic. We further undertake a meticulous comparison of ChatGPT and GPT-4’s Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and Dialectal Arabic (DA), unveiling the relative shortcomings of both models in handling Arabic dialects compared to MSA. Although we further explore and confirm the utility of employing GPT-4 as a potential alternative for human evaluation, our work adds to a growing body of research underscoring the limitations of ChatGPT.
Anthology ID:
2023.emnlp-main.16
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
220–247
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.16
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.16
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Md Tawkat Islam Khondaker, Abdul Waheed, El Moatez Billah Nagoudi, and Muhammad Abdul-Mageed. 2023. GPTAraEval: A Comprehensive Evaluation of ChatGPT on Arabic NLP. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 220–247, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
GPTAraEval: A Comprehensive Evaluation of ChatGPT on Arabic NLP (Khondaker et al., EMNLP 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.16.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.16.mp4