Large-scale datasets are foundational for research and development in natural language processing. However, current approaches face three key challenges: (1) reliance on ambiguously licensed sources restricting use, sharing, and derivative works; (2) static dataset releases that prevent community contributions and diminish longevity; and (3) quality assurance processes restricted to publishing teams rather than leveraging community expertise. To address these limitations, we introduce two contributions: the Dynaword approach and Danish Dynaword. The Dynaword approach is a framework for creating large-scale, open datasets that can be continuously updated through community collaboration. Danish Dynaword is a concrete implementation that validates this approach and demonstrates its potential. Danish Dynaword contains over four times as many tokens as comparable releases, is exclusively openly licensed, and has received multiple contributions across industry and research. The repository includes light-weight tests to ensure data formatting, quality, and documentation, establishing a sustainable framework for ongoing community contributions and dataset evolution.

Márton Kardos, Jan Kostkan, Kenneth Enevoldsen, Arnault-Quentin Vermillet, Kristoffer Nielbo, Roberta Rocca. Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2025.

Image representations are often evaluated through disjointed, task-specific protocols, leading to a fragmented understanding of model capabilities. For instance, it is unclear whether an image embedding model adept at clustering images is equally good at retrieving relevant images given a piece of text. We introduce the Massive Image Embedding Benchmark (MIEB) to evaluate the performance of image and image-text embedding models across the broadest spectrum to date. MIEB spans 38 languages across 130 individual tasks, which we group into 8 high-level categories. We benchmark 50 models across our benchmark, finding that no single method dominates across all task categories. We reveal hidden capabilities in advanced vision models such as their accurate visual representation of texts, and their yet limited capabilities in interleaved encodings and matching images and texts in the presence of confounders. We also show that the performance of vision encoders on MIEB correlates highly with their performance when used in multimodal large language models. Our code, dataset, and leaderboard are publicly available at https://github.com/embeddings-benchmark/mteb.

Text embeddings are typically evaluated on a narrow set of tasks, limited in terms of languages, domains, and task types. To circumvent this limitation and to provide a more comprehensive evaluation, we introduce the Massive Multilingual Text Embedding Benchmark (MMTEB) -- a large-scale community-driven initiative expanding MTEB to over 500 quality-controlled evaluation tasks across 1,000+ languages. MMTEB includes a wide range of challenging novel tasks such as instruction following, long-document retrieval, and code retrieval, and represents the largest multilingual collection of evaluation tasks for embedding models to date. We use this collection to construct multiple highly multilingual benchmarks. We evaluate a representative set of models on these benchmarks. Our findings indicate that, while LLM-based models can achieve state-of-the-art performance on a subset of languages, the best-performing publicly available model across languages is the notably smaller, multilingual-e5-large-instruct. Massive benchmarks often impose high computational demands, limiting accessibility, particularly for low-resource communities. To address this, we downsample tasks based on inter-task correlation (i.e., selecting only a diverse set of tasks) while preserving relative rankings. We further optimize tasks such as retrieval by sampling hard negatives, creating smaller but effective splits. These optimizations allow us to introduce benchmarks at a significantly lower computational cost. For instance, we introduce a new zero-shot English benchmark that maintains a similar ordering at a fraction of the cost.

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.