Generalists vs. Specialists: Evaluating Large Language Models for Urdu

In this paper, we compare general-purpose pretrained models, GPT-4-Turbo and Llama-3-8b-Instruct with special-purpose models fine-tuned on specific tasks, XLM-Roberta-large, mT5-large, and Llama-3-8b-Instruct. We focus on seven classification and six generation tasks to evaluate the performance of these models on Urdu language. Urdu has 70 million native speakers, yet it remains underrepresented in NLP. Despite the frequent advancements in LLMs, their performance in low-resource languages, including Urdu, still needs to be explored. We also conduct a human evaluation for the generation tasks and compare the results with the evaluations performed by GPT-4-Turbo and Llama-3-8b-Instruct. We find that special-purpose models consistently outperform general-purpose models across various tasks. We also find that the evaluation done by GPT-4-Turbo for generation tasks aligns more closely with human evaluation compared to the evaluation by Llama-3-8b-Instruct. This paper contributes to the NLP community by providing insights into the effectiveness of general and specific-purpose LLMs for low-resource languages.