TyDi QA: A Benchmark for Information-Seeking Question Answering in Typologically Diverse Languages
Abstract
Confidently making progress on multilingual modeling requires challenging, trustworthy evaluations. We present TyDi QA, a question answering dataset covering 11 typologically diverse languages. Until recently, most multilingual research in natural language processing has been limited to machine translation or to technical tasks such as tagging and parsing. Question answering offers a scenario that is natural in that non-technical users intuitively understand the task, allowing high quality data collection in the absence of abundant annotators with expertise in both linguistics and the language of interest. This allows us select languages that are diverse with regard to their typology -- the set of linguistic features that each language expresses. We expect that models that can perform well on this set will generalize across a large number of the languages in the world. To encourage a more realistic distribution, the data is collected entirely in each native language without the use of translation (human or otherwise) and question creation is performed without seeing the answers. We present a quantitative analysis of the data quality, we provide example-level linguistic analyses and glosses of language phenomena that would not be found in English-only corpora, and we measure the performance of baseline systems.
Research Areas
