Cross-lingual Open-Retrieval Question Answering for African Languages
Odunayo Ogundepo, Tajuddeen Gwadabe, Clara E. Rivera, Jonathan H. Clark, Sebastian Ruder, David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Bonaventure F. P. Dossou, Abdou Aziz DIOP
Abstract
African languages have far less in-language content available digitally, making it challenging for question answering systems to satisfy the information needs of users. Cross-lingual open-retrieval question answering (XOR QA) systems -- those that retrieve answer content from other languages while serving people in their native language---offer a means of filling this gap. To this end, we create Our Dataset, the first cross-lingual QA dataset with a focus on African languages. Our Dataset includes 12,000+ XOR QA examples across 10 African languages. While previous datasets have focused primarily on languages where cross-lingual QA augments coverage from the target language, Our Dataset focuses on languages where cross-lingual answer content is the only high-coverage source of answer content. Because of this, we argue that African languages are one of the most important and realistic use cases for XOR QA. Our experiments demonstrate the poor performance of automatic translation and multilingual retrieval methods. Overall, Our Dataset proves challenging for state-of-the-art QA models. We hope that the dataset enables the development of more equitable QA technology.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{
ogundepo2023crosslingual,
title={Cross-lingual Open-Retrieval Question Answering for African Languages},
author={Odunayo Ogundepo and Tajuddeen Gwadabe and Clara E. Rivera and Jonathan H. Clark and Sebastian Ruder and David Ifeoluwa Adelani and Bonaventure F. P. Dossou and Abdou Aziz DIOP and Claytone Sikasote and Gilles HACHEME and Happy Buzaaba and Ignatius Ezeani and Rooweither Mabuya and Salomey Osei and Chris Chinenye Emezue and Albert Kahira and Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad and Akintunde Oladipo and Abraham Toluwase Owodunni and Atnafu Lambebo Tonja and Iyanuoluwa Shode and Akari Asai and Anuoluwapo Aremu and Ayodele Awokoya and Bernard Opoku and Chiamaka Ijeoma Chukwuneke and Christine Mwase and Clemencia Siro and Stephen Arthur and Tunde Oluwaseyi Ajayi and Verrah Akinyi Otiende and Andre Niyongabo Rubungo and Boyd Sinkala and Daniel Ajisafe and Emeka Felix Onwuegbuzia and Falalu Ibrahim Lawan and Ibrahim Said Ahmad and Jesujoba Oluwadara Alabi and CHINEDU EMMANUEL MBONU and Mofetoluwa Adeyemi and Mofya Phiri and Orevaoghene Ahia and Ruqayya Nasir Iro and Sonia Adhiambo},
booktitle={The 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing},
year={2023},
url={https://openreview.net/forum?id=3ymHqvobHJ}
}