Multilingual Non-Factoid Question Answering with Answer Paragraph Selection

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Main Authors: Mishra, Ritwik, Vennam, Sreeram, Shah, Rajiv Ratn, Kumaraguru, Ponnurangam
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Mishra, Ritwik
Vennam, Sreeram
Shah, Rajiv Ratn
Kumaraguru, Ponnurangam
author_facet Mishra, Ritwik
Vennam, Sreeram
Shah, Rajiv Ratn
Kumaraguru, Ponnurangam
contents Most existing Question Answering Datasets (QuADs) primarily focus on factoid-based short-context Question Answering (QA) in high-resource languages. However, the scope of such datasets for low-resource languages remains limited, with only a few works centered on factoid-based QuADs and none on non-factoid QuADs. Therefore, this work presents MuNfQuAD, a multilingual QuAD with non-factoid questions. It utilizes interrogative sub-headings from BBC news articles as questions and the corresponding paragraphs as silver answers. The dataset comprises over 578K QA pairs across 38 languages, encompassing several low-resource languages, and stands as the largest multilingual QA dataset to date. Based on the manual annotations of 790 QA-pairs from MuNfQuAD (golden set), we observe that 98\% of questions can be answered using their corresponding silver answer. Our fine-tuned Answer Paragraph Selection (APS) model outperforms the baselines. The APS model attained an accuracy of 80\% and 72\%, as well as a macro F1 of 72\% and 66\%, on the MuNfQuAD testset and the golden set, respectively. Furthermore, the APS model effectively generalizes a certain language within the golden set, even after being fine-tuned on silver labels. We also observe that the fine-tuned APS model is beneficial for reducing the context of a question. These findings suggest that this resource would be a valuable contribution to the QA research community.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2408_10604
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Multilingual Non-Factoid Question Answering with Answer Paragraph Selection
Mishra, Ritwik
Vennam, Sreeram
Shah, Rajiv Ratn
Kumaraguru, Ponnurangam
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Information Retrieval
Machine Learning
Most existing Question Answering Datasets (QuADs) primarily focus on factoid-based short-context Question Answering (QA) in high-resource languages. However, the scope of such datasets for low-resource languages remains limited, with only a few works centered on factoid-based QuADs and none on non-factoid QuADs. Therefore, this work presents MuNfQuAD, a multilingual QuAD with non-factoid questions. It utilizes interrogative sub-headings from BBC news articles as questions and the corresponding paragraphs as silver answers. The dataset comprises over 578K QA pairs across 38 languages, encompassing several low-resource languages, and stands as the largest multilingual QA dataset to date. Based on the manual annotations of 790 QA-pairs from MuNfQuAD (golden set), we observe that 98\% of questions can be answered using their corresponding silver answer. Our fine-tuned Answer Paragraph Selection (APS) model outperforms the baselines. The APS model attained an accuracy of 80\% and 72\%, as well as a macro F1 of 72\% and 66\%, on the MuNfQuAD testset and the golden set, respectively. Furthermore, the APS model effectively generalizes a certain language within the golden set, even after being fine-tuned on silver labels. We also observe that the fine-tuned APS model is beneficial for reducing the context of a question. These findings suggest that this resource would be a valuable contribution to the QA research community.
title Multilingual Non-Factoid Question Answering with Answer Paragraph Selection
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Information Retrieval
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.10604