@inproceedings{gorodissky-etal-2025-cross,
    title = "Cross-Lingual Extractive Question Answering with Unanswerable Questions",
    author = "Gorodissky, Yuval  and
      Sulem, Elior  and
      Roth, Dan",
    editor = "Frermann, Lea  and
      Stevenson, Mark",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 14th Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM 2025)",
    month = nov,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Suzhou, China",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.starsem-1.8/",
    pages = "100--121",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-340-1",
    abstract = "Cross-lingual Extractive Question Answering (EQA) extends standard EQA by requiring models to find answers in passages written in languages different from the questions. The Generalized Cross-Lingual Transfer (G-XLT) task evaluates models' zero-shot ability to transfer question answering capabilities across languages using only English training data. While previous research has primarily focused on scenarios where answers are always present, real-world applications often encounter situations where no answer exists within the given context. This paper introduces an enhanced G-XLT task definition that explicitly handles unanswerable questions, bridging a critical gap in current research. To address this challenge, we present two new datasets: miXQuAD and MLQA-IDK, which address both answerable and unanswerable questions and respectively cover 12 and 7 language pairs. Our study evaluates state-of-the-art large language models using fine-tuning, parameter-efficient techniques, and in-context learning approaches, revealing interesting trade-offs between a smaller fine-tuned model{'}s performance on answerable questions versus a larger in-context learning model{'}s capability on unanswerable questions. We also examine language similarity patterns based on model performance, finding alignments with known language families."
}