Analysis of large corpora of online news content requires robust validation of underlying metadata extraction methodologies. Identifying the author of a given web-based news article is one example that enables various types of research questions. While numerous solutions for off-the-shelf author extraction exist, there is little work comparing performance (especially in multilingual settings). In this paper we present a manually coded cross-lingual dataset of authors of online news articles and use it to evaluate the performance of five existing software packages and one customized model. Our evaluation shows evidence for Go-readability and Trafilatura as the most consistent solutions for author extraction, but we find all packages produce highly variable results across languages. These findings are relevant for researchers wishing to utilize author data in their analysis pipelines, primarily indicating that further validation for specific languages and geographies is required to rely on results.

Language models demonstrate both quantitative improvement and new qualitative capabilities with increasing scale. Despite their potentially transformative impact, these new capabilities are as yet poorly characterized. In order to inform future research, prepare for disruptive new model capabilities, and ameliorate socially harmful effects, it is vital that we understand the present and near-future capabilities and limitations of language models. To address this challenge, we introduce the Beyond the Imitation Game benchmark (BIG-bench). BIG-bench currently consists of 204 tasks, contributed by 450 authors across 132 institutions. Task topics are diverse, drawing problems from linguistics, childhood development, math, common-sense reasoning, biology, physics, social bias, software development, and beyond. BIG-bench focuses on tasks that are believed to be beyond the capabilities of current language models. We evaluate the behavior of OpenAI's GPT models, Google-internal dense transformer architectures, and Switch-style sparse transformers on BIG-bench, across model sizes spanning millions to hundreds of billions of parameters. In addition, a team of human expert raters performed all tasks in order to provide a strong baseline. Findings include: model performance and calibration both improve with scale, but are poor in absolute terms (and when compared with rater performance); performance is remarkably similar across model classes, though with benefits from sparsity; tasks that improve gradually and predictably commonly involve a large knowledge or memorization component, whereas tasks that exhibit "breakthrough" behavior at a critical scale often involve multiple steps or components, or brittle metrics; social bias typically increases with scale in settings with ambiguous context, but this can be improved with prompting.