Multilingual State Space Models for Structured Question Answering in Indic Languages

Arpita Vats, Rahul Raja, Mrinal Mathur, Aman Chadha, Vinija Jain


Abstract
The diversity and complexity of Indic languages present unique challenges for natural language processing (NLP) tasks, particularly in the domain of question answering (QA).To address these challenges, this paper explores the application of State Space Models (SSMs) to build efficient and contextually aware QA systems tailored for Indic languages. SSMs are particularly suited for this task due to their ability to model long-term and short-term dependencies in sequential data, making them well-equipped to handle the rich morphology, complex syntax, and contextual intricacies characteristic of Indian languages. We evaluated multiple SSM architectures across diverse datasets representing various Indic languages and conducted a comparative analysis of their performance. Our results demonstrate that these models effectively capture linguistic subtleties, leading to significant improvements in question interpretation, context alignment, and answer generation. This work represents the first application of SSMs to question answering tasks in Indic languages, establishing a foundational benchmark for future research in this domain. Furthermore, we propose enhancements to existing SSM frameworks, optimizing their applicability to low-resource settings and multilingual scenarios prevalent in Indic languages.
Anthology ID:
2025.loresmt-1.11
Volume:
Proceedings of the Eighth Workshop on Technologies for Machine Translation of Low-Resource Languages (LoResMT 2025)
Month:
May
Year:
2025
Address:
Albuquerque, New Mexico, U.S.A.
Editors:
Atul Kr. Ojha, Chao-hong Liu, Ekaterina Vylomova, Flammie Pirinen, Jonathan Washington, Nathaniel Oco, Xiaobing Zhao
Venues:
LoResMT | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
115–128
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2025.loresmt-1.11/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Arpita Vats, Rahul Raja, Mrinal Mathur, Aman Chadha, and Vinija Jain. 2025. Multilingual State Space Models for Structured Question Answering in Indic Languages. In Proceedings of the Eighth Workshop on Technologies for Machine Translation of Low-Resource Languages (LoResMT 2025), pages 115–128, Albuquerque, New Mexico, U.S.A.. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Multilingual State Space Models for Structured Question Answering in Indic Languages (Vats et al., LoResMT 2025)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2025.loresmt-1.11.pdf