The evaluation of English text embeddings has transitioned from evaluating a handful of datasets to broad coverage across many tasks through benchmarks such as MTEB. However, this is not the case for multilingual text embeddings due to a lack of available benchmarks. To address this problem, we introduce the Scandinavian Embedding Benchmark (SEB). SEB is a comprehensive framework that enables text embedding evaluation for Scandinavian languages across 24 tasks, 10 subtasks, and 4 task categories. Building on SEB, we evaluate more than 26 models, uncovering significant performance disparities between public and commercial solutions not previously captured by MTEB. We open-source SEB and integrate it with MTEB, thus bridging the text embedding evaluation gap for Scandinavian languages.
@article{arxiv.2406.02396,
title = {The Scandinavian Embedding Benchmarks: Comprehensive Assessment of Multilingual and Monolingual Text Embedding},
author = {Kenneth Enevoldsen and Márton Kardos and Niklas Muennighoff and Kristoffer Laigaard Nielbo},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2406.02396},
year = {2024}
}