As the Information Retrieval (IR) field increasingly recognizes the importance of inclusivity, addressing the needs of low-resource languages remains a significant challenge. Transliteration between Urdu and its Romanized form, Roman Urdu, remains underexplored despite the widespread use of both scripts in South Asia. Prior work using RNNs on the Roman-Urdu-Parl dataset showed promising results but suffered from poor domain adaptability and limited evaluation. We propose a transformer-based approach using the m2m100 multilingual translation model, enhanced with masked language modeling (MLM) pretraining and fine-tuning on both Roman-Urdu-Parl and the domain diverse Dakshina dataset. To address previous evaluation flaws, we introduce rigorous dataset splits and assess performance using BLEU, character-level BLEU, and CHRF. Our model achieves strong transliteration performance, with Char-BLEU scores of 96.37 for Urdu→Roman-Urdu and 97.44 for Roman-Urdu→Urdu. These results outperform both RNN baselines and GPT-4o Mini and demonstrate the effectiveness of multilingual transfer learning for low-resource transliteration tasks.

In this work, we reimagine classical probing to evaluate knowledge transfer from simple source to more complex target tasks. Instead of probing frozen representations from a complex source task on diverse simple target probing tasks (as usually done in probing), we explore the effectiveness of embeddings from multiple simple source tasks on a single target task. We select coreference resolution, a linguistically complex problem requiring contextual understanding, as focus target task, and test the usefulness of embeddings from comparably simpler tasks tasks such as paraphrase detection, named entity recognition, and relation extraction. Through systematic experiments, we evaluate the impact of individual and combined task embeddings. Our findings reveal that task embeddings vary significantly in utility for coreference resolution, with semantic similarity tasks (e.g., paraphrase detection) proving most beneficial. Additionally, representations from intermediate layers of fine-tuned models often outperform those from final layers. Combining embeddings from multiple tasks consistently improves performance, with attention-based aggregation yielding substantial gains. These insights shed light on relationships between task-specific representations and their adaptability to complex downstream tasks, encouraging further exploration of embedding-level task transfer. Our source code is publicly available under https://github.com/Cora4NLP/multi-task-knowledge-transfer.

Dense passage retrieval models have become state-of-the-art for information retrieval on many Open-domain Question Answering (ODQA) datasets. However, most of these models rely on supervision obtained from the ODQA datasets, which hinders their performance in a low-resource setting. Recently, retrieval-augmented language models have been proposed to improve both zero-shot and supervised information retrieval. However, these models have pre-training tasks that are agnostic to the target task of passage retrieval. In this work, we propose Retrieval Augmented Auto-encoding of Questions for zero-shot dense information retrieval. Unlike other pre-training methods, our pre-training method is built for target information retrieval, thereby making the pre-training more efficient. Our method consists of a dense IR model for encoding questions and retrieving documents during training and a conditional language model that maximizes the question’s likelihood by marginalizing over retrieved documents. As a by-product, we can use this conditional language model for zero-shot question generation from documents. We show that the IR model obtained through our method improves the current state-of-the-art of zero-shot dense information retrieval, and we improve the results even further by training on a synthetic corpus created by zero-shot question generation.

There has been a significant progress in the field of Extractive Question Answering (EQA) in the recent years. However, most of them are reliant on annotations of answer-spans in the corresponding passages. In this work, we address the problem of EQA when no annotations are present for the answer span, i.e., when the dataset contains only questions and corresponding passages. Our method is based on auto-encoding of the question that performs a question answering task during encoding and a question generation task during decoding. We show that our method performs well in a zero-shot setting and can provide an additional loss to boost performance for EQA.

Contextualized word embeddings provide better initialization for neural networks that deal with various natural language understanding (NLU) tasks including Question Answering (QA) and more recently, Question Generation(QG). Apart from providing meaningful word representations, pre-trained transformer models (Vaswani et al., 2017), such as BERT (Devlin et al., 2019) also provide self-attentions which encode syntactic information that can be probed for dependency parsing (Hewitt and Manning, 2019) and POStagging (Coenen et al., 2019). In this paper, we show that the information from selfattentions of BERT are useful for language modeling of questions conditioned on paragraph and answer phrases. To control the attention span, we use semi-diagonal mask and utilize a shared model for encoding and decoding, unlike sequence-to-sequence. We further employ copy-mechanism over self-attentions to acheive state-of-the-art results for Question Generation on SQuAD v1.1 (Rajpurkar et al., 2016).

In the following, we describe our system developed for the Semeval2019 Task 8. We fine-tuned a BERT checkpoint on the qatar living forum dump and used this checkpoint to train a number of models. Our hand-in for subtask A consists of a fine-tuned classifier from this BERT checkpoint. For subtask B, we first have a classifier deciding whether a comment is factual or non-factual. If it is factual, we retrieve intra-forum evidence and using this evidence, have a classifier deciding the comment’s veracity. We trained this classifier on ratings which we crawled from qatarliving.com