Enhancing Low-Resource Languages Question Answering with Syntactic Graph

No Thumbnail Available
File version
Author(s)
Wu, Linjuan
Zhu, Jiazheng
Zhang, Xiaowang
Zhuang, Zhiqiang
Feng, ZhiYong
Griffith University Author(s)
Primary Supervisor
Other Supervisors
Editor(s)

Rage, UK

Goyal, V

Reddy, PK

Date
2022
Size
File type(s)
Location

Virtual

License
Abstract

Multilingual pre-trained language models (PLMs) facilitate zero-shot cross-lingual transfer from rich-resource languages to low-resource languages in extractive question answering (QA) tasks. However, during fine-tuning on the QA task, the syntactic information of languages in multilingual PLMs is not always preserved or even is forgotten, which may influence the detection of answer spans for low-resource languages. In this paper, we propose an auxiliary task to predict syntactic graphs to enhance syntax information in the fine-tuning stage of the QA task to improve the answer span detection of low-resource. The syntactic graph includes Part-of-Speech (POS) information and syntax tree information without dependency parse label. We convert the syntactic graph prediction task into two subtasks to adapt the sequence input of PLMs: POS tags prediction task and syntax tree prediction task (including depth prediction of a word and distance prediction of two words). Moreover, to improve the alignment between languages, we parallel train the source language and target languages syntactic graph prediction task. Extensive experiments on three multilingual QA datasets show the effectiveness of our proposed approach.

Journal Title
Conference Title

Database Systems for Advanced Applications. DASFAA 2022 International Workshops: BDMS, BDQM, GDMA, IWBT, MAQTDS, and PMBD, Virtual Event, April 11–14, 2022, Proceedings

Book Title
Edition
Volume

13248

Issue
Thesis Type
Degree Program
School
Publisher link
Patent number
Funder(s)
Grant identifier(s)
Rights Statement
Rights Statement
Item Access Status
Note
Access the data
Related item(s)
Subject

Applied computing

Information and computing sciences

Computer Science

Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence

Computer Science, Information Systems

Computer Science, Theory & Methods

Low-resource language

Persistent link to this record
Citation

Wu, L; Zhu, J; Zhang, X; Zhuang, Z; Feng, Z, Enhancing Low-Resource Languages Question Answering with Syntactic Graph, Database Systems for Advanced Applications. DASFAA 2022 International Workshops: BDMS, BDQM, GDMA, IWBT, MAQTDS, and PMBD, Virtual Event, April 11–14, 2022, Proceedings, 2022, 13248, pp. 175-188