Fardina Fathmiul Alam


2021

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Towards more equitable question answering systems: How much more data do you need?
Arnab Debnath | Navid Rajabi | Fardina Fathmiul Alam | Antonios Anastasopoulos
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 2: Short Papers)

Question answering (QA) in English has been widely explored, but multilingual datasets are relatively new, with several methods attempting to bridge the gap between high- and low-resourced languages using data augmentation through translation and cross-lingual transfer. In this project we take a step back and study which approaches allow us to take the most advantage of existing resources in order to produce QA systems in many languages. Specifically, we perform extensive analysis to measure the efficacy of few-shot approaches augmented with automatic translations and permutations of context-question-answer pairs. In addition, we make suggestions for future dataset development efforts that make better use of a fixed annotation budget, with a goal of increasing the language coverage of QA datasets and systems.