Vrunda N Sukhadia

Md. Arid Hasan, Maram Hasanain, Fatema Ahmad et al. · utoronto

Natural Question Answering (QA) datasets play a crucial role in evaluating the capabilities of large language models (LLMs), ensuring their effectiveness in real-world applications. Despite the numerous QA datasets that have been developed and some work has been done in parallel, there is a notable lack of a framework and large scale region-specific datasets queried by native users in their own languages. This gap hinders the effective benchmarking and the development of fine-tuned models for regional and cultural specificities. In this study, we propose a scalable, language-independent framework, NativQA, to seamlessly construct culturally and regionally aligned QA datasets in native languages, for LLM evaluation and tuning. We demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed framework by designing a multilingual natural QA dataset, MultiNativQA, consisting of ~64k manually annotated QA pairs in seven languages, ranging from high to extremely low resource, based on queries from native speakers from 9 regions covering 18 topics. We benchmark open- and closed-source LLMs with the MultiNativQA dataset. We made the MultiNativQA dataset(https://huggingface.co/datasets/QCRI/MultiNativQA), and other experimental scripts(https://gitlab.com/nativqa/multinativqa) publicly available for the community.

A Arunkumar, Vrunda N Sukhadia, S. Umesh

Self-supervised learning (SSL) based models have been shown to generate powerful representations that can be used to improve the performance of downstream speech tasks. Several state-of-the-art SSL models are available, and each of these models optimizes a different loss which gives rise to the possibility of their features being complementary. This paper proposes using an ensemble of such SSL representations and models, which exploits the complementary nature of the features extracted by the various pretrained models. We hypothesize that this results in a richer feature representation and shows results for the ASR downstream task. To this end, we use three SSL models that have shown excellent results on ASR tasks, namely HuBERT, Wav2vec2.0, and WaveLM. We explore the ensemble of models fine-tuned for the ASR task and the ensemble of features using the embeddings obtained from the pre-trained models for a downstream ASR task. We get improved performance over individual models and pre-trained features using Librispeech(100h) and WSJ dataset for the downstream tasks.