KLUE: Korean Language Understanding Evaluation

20 May 2021 · Sungjoon Park, Jihyung Moon, Sungdong Kim, Won Ik Cho, Jiyoon Han, Jangwon Park, Chisung Song, JunSeong Kim, Yongsook Song, Taehwan Oh, Joohong Lee, Juhyun Oh, Sungwon Lyu, Younghoon Jeong, InKwon Lee, Sangwoo Seo, Dongjun Lee, Hyunwoo Kim, Myeonghwa Lee, Seongbo Jang, Seungwon Do, Sunkyoung Kim, Kyungtae Lim, Jongwon Lee, Kyumin Park, Jamin Shin, Seonghyun Kim, Lucy Park, Alice Oh, Jung-Woo Ha, Kyunghyun Cho ·

We introduce Korean Language Understanding Evaluation (KLUE) benchmark. KLUE is a collection of 8 Korean natural language understanding (NLU) tasks, including Topic Classification, SemanticTextual Similarity, Natural Language Inference, Named Entity Recognition, Relation Extraction, Dependency Parsing, Machine Reading Comprehension, and Dialogue State Tracking. We build all of the tasks from scratch from diverse source corpora while respecting copyrights, to ensure accessibility for anyone without any restrictions. With ethical considerations in mind, we carefully design annotation protocols. Along with the benchmark tasks and data, we provide suitable evaluation metrics and fine-tuning recipes for pretrained language models for each task. We furthermore release the pretrained language models (PLM), KLUE-BERT and KLUE-RoBERTa, to help reproducing baseline models on KLUE and thereby facilitate future research. We make a few interesting observations from the preliminary experiments using the proposed KLUE benchmark suite, already demonstrating the usefulness of this new benchmark suite. First, we find KLUE-RoBERTa-large outperforms other baselines, including multilingual PLMs and existing open-source Korean PLMs. Second, we see minimal degradation in performance even when we replace personally identifiable information from the pretraining corpus, suggesting that privacy and NLU capability are not at odds with each other. Lastly, we find that using BPE tokenization in combination with morpheme-level pre-tokenization is effective in tasks involving morpheme-level tagging, detection and generation. In addition to accelerating Korean NLP research, our comprehensive documentation on creating KLUE will facilitate creating similar resources for other languages in the future. KLUE is available at https://klue-benchmark.com.

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