African languages are severely under-represented in NLP research due to lack of datasets covering several NLP tasks. While there are individual language specific datasets that are being expanded to different tasks, only a handful of NLP tasks (e.g. named entity recognition and machine translation) have standardized benchmark datasets covering several geographical and typologically-diverse African languages. In this paper, we develop MasakhaNEWS -- a new benchmark dataset for news topic classification covering 16 languages widely spoken in Africa. We provide an evaluation of baseline models by training classical machine learning models and fine-tuning several language models. Furthermore, we explore several alternatives to full fine-tuning of language models that are better suited for zero-shot and few-shot learning such as cross-lingual parameter-efficient fine-tuning (like MAD-X), pattern exploiting training (PET), prompting language models (like ChatGPT), and prompt-free sentence transformer fine-tuning (SetFit and Cohere Embedding API). Our evaluation in zero-shot setting shows the potential of prompting ChatGPT for news topic classification in low-resource African languages, achieving an average performance of 70 F1 points without leveraging additional supervision like MAD-X. In few-shot setting, we show that with as little as 10 examples per label, we achieved more than 90\% (i.e. 86.0 F1 points) of the performance of full supervised training (92.6 F1 points) leveraging the PET approach.

翻译：非洲语言在自然语言处理研究中严重缺乏代表性，这是因为缺乏覆盖多项自然语言处理任务的数据集。尽管存在一些正在扩展至不同任务的语言特定数据集，但仅有少数NLP任务（如命名实体识别和机器翻译）拥有覆盖多个地理和类型学多样的非洲语言的标准化基准数据集。本文中，我们开发了MasakhaNEWS——一个覆盖16种非洲广泛使用语言的新新闻主题分类基准数据集。我们通过训练经典机器学习模型并微调多种语言模型，提供了基线模型的评估。此外，我们探索了多种替代完全微调语言模型的方法，这些方法更适用于零样本和少样本学习，例如跨语言参数高效微调（如MAD-X）、模式利用训练（PET）、提示语言模型（如ChatGPT）以及无提示句子变换器微调（SetFit和Cohere嵌入API）。我们在零样本设置下的评估显示了利用ChatGPT进行低资源非洲语言新闻主题分类的潜力，在未利用如MAD-X等额外监督的情况下，平均实现了70 F1分。在少样本设置下，我们展示了每标签仅使用10个示例，通过PET方法即可达到全监督训练性能（92.6 F1分）的90%以上（即86.0 F1分）。