African languages have far less in-language content available digitally, making it challenging for question answering systems to satisfy the information needs of users. Cross-lingual open-retrieval question answering (XOR QA) systems – those that retrieve answer content from other languages while serving people in their native language—offer a means of filling this gap. To this end, we create Our Dataset, the first cross-lingual QA dataset with a focus on African languages. Our Dataset includes 12,000+ XOR QA examples across 10 African languages. While previous datasets have focused primarily on languages where cross-lingual QA augments coverage from the target language, Our Dataset focuses on languages where cross-lingual answer content is the only high-coverage source of answer content. Because of this, we argue that African languages are one of the most important and realistic use cases for XOR QA. Our experiments demonstrate the poor performance of automatic translation and multilingual retrieval methods. Overall, Our Dataset proves challenging for state-of-the-art QA models. We hope that the dataset enables the development of more equitable QA technology.

In this study, we highlight the importance of enhancing the quality of pretraining data in multilingual language models. Existing web crawls have demonstrated quality issues, particularly in the context of low-resource languages. Consequently, we introduce a new multilingual pretraining corpus for 16 African languages, designed by carefully auditing existing pretraining corpora to understand and rectify prevalent quality issues. To compile this dataset, we undertake a rigorous examination of current data sources for thirteen languages within one of the most extensive multilingual web crawls, mC4, and extract cleaner data through meticulous auditing and improved web crawling strategies. Subsequently, we pretrain a new T5-based model on this dataset and evaluate its performance on multiple downstream tasks. Our model demonstrates better downstream effectiveness over existing pretrained models across four NLP tasks, underscoring the critical role data quality plays in pretraining language models in low-resource scenarios. Specifically, on cross-lingual QA evaluation, our new model is more than twice as effective as multilingual T5. All code, data and models are publicly available at https://github.com/castorini/AfriTeVa-keji.

We present Spacerini, a tool that integrates the Pyserini toolkit for reproducible information retrieval research with Hugging Face to enable the seamless construction and deployment of interactive search engines. Spacerini makes state-of-the-art sparse and dense retrieval models more accessible to non-IR practitioners while minimizing deployment effort. This is useful for NLP researchers who want to better understand and validate their research by performing qualitative analyses of training corpora, for IR researchers who want to demonstrate new retrieval models integrated into the growing Pyserini ecosystem, and for third parties reproducing the work of other researchers. Spacerini is open source and includes utilities for loading, preprocessing, indexing, and deploying search engines locally and remotely. We demonstrate a portfolio of 13 search engines created with Spacerini for different use cases.

Noticing the urgent need to provide tools for fast and user-friendly qualitative analysis of large-scale textual corpora of the modern NLP, we propose to turn to the mature and well-tested methods from the domain of Information Retrieval (IR) - a research field with a long history of tackling TB-scale document collections. We discuss how Pyserini - a widely used toolkit for reproducible IR research can be integrated with the Hugging Face ecosystem of open-source AI libraries and artifacts. We leverage the existing functionalities of both platforms while proposing novel features further facilitating their integration. Our goal is to give NLP researchers tools that will allow them to develop retrieval-based instrumentation for their data analytics needs with ease and agility. We include a Jupyter Notebook-based walk through the core interoperability features, available on GitHub: https://github.com/huggingface/gaia. We then demonstrate how the ideas we present can be operationalized to create a powerful tool for qualitative data analysis in NLP. We present GAIA Search - a search engine built following previously laid out principles, giving access to four popular large-scale text collections. GAIA serves a dual purpose of illustrating the potential of methodologies we discuss but also as a standalone qualitative analysis tool that can be leveraged by NLP researchers aiming to understand datasets prior to using them in training. GAIA is hosted live on Hugging Face Spaces: https://huggingface.co/spaces/spacerini/gaia.

Pretrained language models represent the state of the art in NLP, but the successful construction of such models often requires large amounts of data and computational resources. Thus, the paucity of data for low-resource languages impedes the development of robust NLP capabilities for these languages. There has been some recent success in pretraining encoderonly models solely on a combination of lowresource African languages, exemplified by AfriBERTa. In this work, we extend the approach of “small data” pretraining to encoder– decoder models. We introduce AfriTeVa, a family of sequence-to-sequence models derived from T5 that are pretrained on 10 African languages from scratch. With a pretraining corpus of only around 1GB, we show that it is possible to achieve competitive downstream effectiveness for machine translation and text classification, compared to larger models trained on much more data. All the code and model checkpoints described in this work are publicly available at https://github.com/castorini/afriteva.