Towards more equitable question answering systems: How much more data do you need?

Arnab Debnath, Navid Rajabi, Fardina Fathmiul Alam, Antonios Anastasopoulos


Abstract
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.
Anthology ID:
2021.acl-short.79
Volume:
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)
Month:
August
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Chengqing Zong, Fei Xia, Wenjie Li, Roberto Navigli
Venues:
ACL | IJCNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
621–629
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-short.79
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.acl-short.79
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Arnab Debnath, Navid Rajabi, Fardina Fathmiul Alam, and Antonios Anastasopoulos. 2021. Towards more equitable question answering systems: How much more data do you need?. In 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), pages 621–629, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Towards more equitable question answering systems: How much more data do you need? (Debnath et al., ACL-IJCNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-3/2021.acl-short.79.pdf
Video:
 https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-3/2021.acl-short.79.mp4
Code
 NavidRajabi/EMQA
Data
MLQASQuADTyDiQA