MTEB-French: Resources for French Sentence Embedding Evaluation and Analysis

Abstract: Recently, numerous embedding models have been made available and widely used for various NLP tasks. The Massive Text Embedding Benchmark (MTEB) has primarily simplified the process of choosing a model that performs well for several tasks in English, but extensions to other languages remain challenging. This is why we expand MTEB to propose the first massive benchmark of sentence embeddings for French. We gather 15 existing datasets in an easy-to-use interface and create three new French datasets for a global evaluation of 8 task categories. We compare 51 carefully selected embedding models on a large scale, conduct comprehensive statistical tests, and analyze the correlation between model performance and many of their characteristics. We find out that even if no model is the best on all tasks, large multilingual models pre-trained on sentence similarity perform exceptionally well. Our work comes with open-source code, new datasets and a public leaderboard.