IndicSQuAD: A Comprehensive Multilingual Question Answering Dataset for Indic Languages

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Endait, Sharvi, Ghatage, Ruturaj, Kulkarni, Aditya, Patil, Rajlaxmi, Joshi, Raviraj
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Endait, Sharvi
Ghatage, Ruturaj
Kulkarni, Aditya
Patil, Rajlaxmi
Joshi, Raviraj
author_facet Endait, Sharvi
Ghatage, Ruturaj
Kulkarni, Aditya
Patil, Rajlaxmi
Joshi, Raviraj
contents The rapid progress in question-answering (QA) systems has predominantly benefited high-resource languages, leaving Indic languages largely underrepresented despite their vast native speaker base. In this paper, we present IndicSQuAD, a comprehensive multi-lingual extractive QA dataset covering nine major Indic languages, systematically derived from the SQuAD dataset. Building on previous work with MahaSQuAD for Marathi, our approach adapts and extends translation techniques to maintain high linguistic fidelity and accurate answer-span alignment across diverse languages. IndicSQuAD comprises extensive training, validation, and test sets for each language, providing a robust foundation for model development. We evaluate baseline performances using language-specific monolingual BERT models and the multilingual MuRIL-BERT. The results indicate some challenges inherent in low-resource settings. Moreover, our experiments suggest potential directions for future work, including expanding to additional languages, developing domain-specific datasets, and incorporating multimodal data. The dataset and models are publicly shared at https://github.com/l3cube-pune/indic-nlp
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_03688
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle IndicSQuAD: A Comprehensive Multilingual Question Answering Dataset for Indic Languages
Endait, Sharvi
Ghatage, Ruturaj
Kulkarni, Aditya
Patil, Rajlaxmi
Joshi, Raviraj
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
The rapid progress in question-answering (QA) systems has predominantly benefited high-resource languages, leaving Indic languages largely underrepresented despite their vast native speaker base. In this paper, we present IndicSQuAD, a comprehensive multi-lingual extractive QA dataset covering nine major Indic languages, systematically derived from the SQuAD dataset. Building on previous work with MahaSQuAD for Marathi, our approach adapts and extends translation techniques to maintain high linguistic fidelity and accurate answer-span alignment across diverse languages. IndicSQuAD comprises extensive training, validation, and test sets for each language, providing a robust foundation for model development. We evaluate baseline performances using language-specific monolingual BERT models and the multilingual MuRIL-BERT. The results indicate some challenges inherent in low-resource settings. Moreover, our experiments suggest potential directions for future work, including expanding to additional languages, developing domain-specific datasets, and incorporating multimodal data. The dataset and models are publicly shared at https://github.com/l3cube-pune/indic-nlp
title IndicSQuAD: A Comprehensive Multilingual Question Answering Dataset for Indic Languages
topic Computation and Language
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.03688