Building a Swedish Question-Answering Model
High quality datasets for question answering exist in a few languages, but far from all. Producing such datasets for new languages requires extensive manual labour. In this work we look at different methods for using existing datasets to train question-answering models in languages lacking such datasets. We show that machine translation followed by cross-lingual projection is a viable way to create a full question-answering dataset in a new language. We introduce new methods both for bitext alignment, using optimal transport, and for direct cross-lingual projection, utilizing multilingual BERT. We show that our methods produce good Swedish question-answering models without any manual work. Finally, we apply our proposed methods on Spanish and evaluate it on the XQuAD and MLQA benchmarks where we achieve new state-of-the-art values of 80.4 F1 and 62.9 Exact Match (EM) points on the Spanish XQuAD corpus and 70.8 F1 and 53.0 EM on the Spanish MLQA corpus, showing that the technique is readily applicable to other languages.
Code (1)
Tasks
Machine TranslationmodelQuestion AnsweringSimilar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
A Diagnostic Benchmark for Sweden-Related Factual Knowledge
Many Swedish benchmarks are translations of US-centric benchmarks and are therefore not suitable for testing knowledge that is particularly relevant, or even specific, to Sweden. We therefore introduce a manually written…
Using street view images and visual LLMs to predict heritage values for governance support: Risks, ethics, and policy implications
During 2025 and 2026, the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive is being implemented in the European Union member states, requiring all member states to have National Building Renovation Plans. In Sweden, there is no…
How to Tune a Multilingual Encoder Model for Germanic Languages: A Study of PEFT, Full Fine-Tuning, and Language Adapters
This paper investigates the optimal use of the multilingual encoder model mDeBERTa for tasks in three Germanic languages -- German, Swedish, and Icelandic -- representing varying levels of presence and likely data qualit…
named-entity-recognitionNamed Entity Recognitionparameter-efficient fine-tuningQuestion AnsweringToward Data-Driven Tutorial Question Answering with Deep Learning Conversational Models
There has been an increase in popularity of data-driven question answering systems given their recent success. This pa-per explores the possibility of building a tutorial question answering system for Java programming fr…
Information RetrievalQuestion AnsweringRetrievalSemantic Parsing+1Playing with Words at the National Library of Sweden -- Making a Swedish BERT
This paper introduces the Swedish BERT ("KB-BERT") developed by the KBLab for data-driven research at the National Library of Sweden (KB). Building on recent efforts to create transformer-based BERT models for languages …
named-entity-recognitionNamed Entity RecognitionNamed Entity Recognition (NER)NER+2