Towards Zero-Shot Multilingual Synthetic Question and Answer Generation for Cross-Lingual Reading Comprehension
This addresses the problem of limited labeled data for multilingual QA systems, enabling broader language coverage, though it is incremental as it builds on existing generative and zero-shot methods.
The paper tackles the problem of generating multilingual question-answer pairs for cross-lingual reading comprehension without requiring labeled data in target languages, using only English training samples. The result shows large gains on the XQuAD dataset, reducing the gap between zero-shot and supervised performance for smaller QA models across various languages.
We propose a simple method to generate multilingual question and answer pairs on a large scale through the use of a single generative model. These synthetic samples can be used to improve the zero-shot performance of multilingual QA models on target languages. Our proposed multi-task training of the generative model only requires the labeled training samples in English, thus removing the need for such samples in the target languages, making it applicable to far more languages than those with labeled data. Human evaluations indicate the majority of such samples are grammatically correct and sensible. Experimental results show our proposed approach can achieve large gains on the XQuAD dataset, reducing the gap between zero-shot and supervised performance of smaller QA models on various languages.