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Despite remarkable advancements in few-shot generalization in natural language processing, most models are developed and evaluated primarily in English. To establish a rigorous and equitable evaluation framework for few-shot cross-lingual transfer, we introduce a new benchmark, called BUFFET, which unifies 15 diverse tasks across 54 languages in a sequence-to-sequence format and provides a fixed set of few-shot examples and instructions. Using BUFFET, we perform thorough evaluations of ten state-of-the-art multilingual large language models with different transfer methods, namely in-context learning and fine-tuning. Our findings reveal significant room for improvement in few-shot in-context cross-lingual transfer. Strong multilingual pre-trained or instruction-tuned models such as BLOOM or ChatGPT often lag behind much smaller mT5-base models given the same number of few-shot samples, particularly in low-resource languages. Our analysis suggests avenues for future research in few-shot cross-lingual transfer. 

Abstract In an information-seeking conversation, a user may ask questions that are under-specified or unanswerable. An ideal agent would interact by initiating different response types according to the available knowledge sources. However, most current studies either fail to or artificially incorporate such agent-side initiative. This work presents InSCIt, a dataset for Information-Seeking Conversations with mixed-initiative Interactions. It contains 4.7K user-agent turns from 805 human-human conversations where the agent searches over Wikipedia and either directly answers, asks for clarification, or provides relevant information to address user queries. The data supports two subtasks, evidence passage identification and response generation, as well as a human evaluation protocol to assess model performance. We report results of two systems based on state-of-the-art models of conversational knowledge identification and open-domain question answering. Both systems significantly underperform humans, suggesting ample room for improvement in future studies.1