# EVJVQA Challenge: Multilingual Visual Question Answering

## TL;DR

The paper introduces EVJVQA, a multilingual VQA benchmark dataset in Vietnamese, English, and Japanese, designed to evaluate and motivate research on culturally specific visual question answering systems.

## Contribution

It provides a new multilingual dataset with over 33,000 question-answer pairs on Vietnamese images and reports on a challenge with top systems using ViT and mT5 models.

## Key findings

- Top F1-score of 0.4392 and BLEU of 0.4009 on private test set.
- Multilingual VQA systems benefit from pre-trained transformer models.
- The dataset and challenge foster further research in culturally aware multilingual VQA.

## Abstract

Visual Question Answering (VQA) is a challenging task of natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision (CV), attracting significant attention from researchers. English is a resource-rich language that has witnessed various developments in datasets and models for visual question answering. Visual question answering in other languages also would be developed for resources and models. In addition, there is no multilingual dataset targeting the visual content of a particular country with its own objects and cultural characteristics. To address the weakness, we provide the research community with a benchmark dataset named EVJVQA, including 33,000+ pairs of question-answer over three languages: Vietnamese, English, and Japanese, on approximately 5,000 images taken from Vietnam for evaluating multilingual VQA systems or models. EVJVQA is used as a benchmark dataset for the challenge of multilingual visual question answering at the 9th Workshop on Vietnamese Language and Speech Processing (VLSP 2022). This task attracted 62 participant teams from various universities and organizations. In this article, we present details of the organization of the challenge, an overview of the methods employed by shared-task participants, and the results. The highest performances are 0.4392 in F1-score and 0.4009 in BLUE on the private test set. The multilingual QA systems proposed by the top 2 teams use ViT for the pre-trained vision model and mT5 for the pre-trained language model, a powerful pre-trained language model based on the transformer architecture. EVJVQA is a challenging dataset that motivates NLP and CV researchers to further explore the multilingual models or systems for visual question answering systems. We released the challenge on the Codalab evaluation system for further research.