Breaking Language Barriers: A Question Answering Dataset for Hindi and Marathi
This addresses the problem of limited resources for building efficient QA systems in Hindi and Marathi, which are widely spoken but low-resource languages, though it is incremental as it adapts an existing dataset.
The paper tackles the challenge of data scarcity for low-resource languages by developing a novel translation approach to create the largest Question Answering dataset for Hindi and Marathi, each with 28,000 samples, and releases best-performing models to facilitate further research.
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.