@inproceedings{de-bruyn-etal-2021-mfaq,
    title = "{MFAQ}: a Multilingual {FAQ} Dataset",
    author = "De Bruyn, Maxime  and
      Lotfi, Ehsan  and
      Buhmann, Jeska  and
      Daelemans, Walter",
    editor = "Fisch, Adam  and
      Talmor, Alon  and
      Chen, Danqi  and
      Choi, Eunsol  and
      Seo, Minjoon  and
      Lewis, Patrick  and
      Jia, Robin  and
      Min, Sewon",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Machine Reading for Question Answering",
    month = nov,
    year = "2021",
    address = "Punta Cana, Dominican Republic",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2021.mrqa-1.1",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2021.mrqa-1.1",
    pages = "1--13",
    abstract = "In this paper, we present the first multilingual FAQ dataset publicly available. We collected around 6M FAQ pairs from the web, in 21 different languages. Although this is significantly larger than existing FAQ retrieval datasets, it comes with its own challenges: duplication of content and uneven distribution of topics. We adopt a similar setup as Dense Passage Retrieval (DPR) and test various bi-encoders on this dataset. Our experiments reveal that a multilingual model based on XLM-RoBERTa achieves the best results, except for English. Lower resources languages seem to learn from one another as a multilingual model achieves a higher MRR than language-specific ones. Our qualitative analysis reveals the brittleness of the model on simple word changes. We publicly release our dataset, model, and training script.",
}