Breaking Language Barriers: A Question Answering Dataset for Hindi and Marathi

TL;DR

This paper introduces the largest question answering datasets for Hindi and Marathi, created by translating SQuAD 2.0, and provides benchmark models to advance NLP research in these low-resource languages.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel translation-based approach to develop large QA datasets for Hindi and Marathi, along with benchmark models and resources for further research.

Findings

Created 28,000 sample QA datasets for Hindi and Marathi

Evaluated multiple architectures and released top models

Facilitated NLP research in low-resource languages

Abstract

The recent advances in deep-learning have led to the development of highly sophisticated systems with an unquenchable appetite for data. On the other hand, building good deep-learning models for low-resource languages remains a challenging task. This paper focuses on developing a Question Answering dataset for two such languages- Hindi and Marathi. Despite Hindi being the 3rd most spoken language worldwide, with 345 million speakers, and Marathi being the 11th most spoken language globally, with 83.2 million speakers, both languages face limited resources for building efficient Question Answering systems. To tackle the challenge of data scarcity, we have developed a novel approach for translating the SQuAD 2.0 dataset into Hindi and Marathi. We release the largest Question-Answering dataset available for these languages, with each dataset containing 28,000 samples. We evaluate the dataset on various architectures and release the best-performing models for both Hindi and Marathi, which will facilitate further research in these languages. Leveraging similarity tools, our method holds the potential to create datasets in diverse languages, thereby enhancing the understanding of natural language across varied linguistic contexts. Our fine-tuned models, code, and dataset will be made publicly available.