  Instruction tuned large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, demonstrate
remarkable performance in a wide range of tasks. Despite numerous recent
studies that examine the performance of instruction-tuned LLMs on various NLP
benchmarks, there remains a lack of comprehensive investigation into their
ability to understand cross-lingual sociopragmatic meaning (SM), i.e., meaning
embedded within social and interactive contexts. This deficiency arises partly
from SM not being adequately represented in any of the existing benchmarks. To
address this gap, we present SPARROW, an extensive multilingual benchmark
specifically designed for SM understanding. SPARROW comprises 169 datasets
covering 13 task types across six primary categories (e.g., anti-social
language detection, emotion recognition). SPARROW datasets encompass 64
different languages originating from 12 language families representing 16
writing scripts. We evaluate the performance of various multilingual pretrained
language models (e.g., mT5) and instruction-tuned LLMs (e.g., BLOOMZ, ChatGPT)
on SPARROW through fine-tuning, zero-shot, and/or few-shot learning. Our
comprehensive analysis reveals that existing open-source instruction tuned LLMs
still struggle to understand SM across various languages, performing close to a
random baseline in some cases. We also find that although ChatGPT outperforms
many LLMs, it still falls behind task-specific finetuned models with a gap of
12.19 SPARROW score. Our benchmark is available at:
https://github.com/UBC-NLP/SPARROW
