The availability of large, high-quality datasets has been a major driver of recent progress in question answering (QA). Such annotated datasets, however, are difficult and costly to collect, and rarely exist in languages other than English, rendering QA technology inaccessible to underrepresented languages. An alternative to building large monolingual training datasets is to leverage pre-trained language models (PLMs) under a few-shot learning setting. Our approach, QAmeleon , uses a PLM to automatically generate multilingual data upon which QA models are fine-tuned, thus avoiding costly annotation. Prompt tuning the PLM with only five examples per language delivers accuracy superior to translation-based baselines; it bridges nearly 60% of the gap between an English-only baseline and a fully-supervised upper bound fine-tuned on almost 50,000 hand-labeled examples; and consistently leads to improvements compared to directly fine-tuning a QA model on labeled examples in low resource settings. Experiments on the TyDiqa-GoldP and MLQA benchmarks show that few-shot prompt tuning for data synthesis scales across languages and is a viable alternative to large-scale annotation. 1

Most recent coreference resolution systems use search algorithms over possible spans to identify mentions and resolve coreference. We instead present a coreference resolution system that uses a text-to-text (seq2seq) paradigm to predict mentions and links jointly. We implement the coreference system as a transition system and use multilingual T5 as an underlying language model. We obtain state-of-the-art accuracy on the CoNLL-2012 datasets with 83.3 F1-score for English (a 2.3 higher F1-score than previous work [Dobrovolskii, 2021 ]) using only CoNLL data for training, 68.5 F1-score for Arabic (+4.1 higher than previous work), and 74.3 F1-score for Chinese (+5.3). In addition we use the SemEval-2010 data sets for experiments in the zero-shot setting, a few-shot setting, and supervised setting using all available training data. We obtain substantially higher zero-shot F1-scores for 3 out of 4 languages than previous approaches and significantly exceed previous supervised state-of-the-art results for all five tested languages. We provide the code and models as open source. 1

A question answering system that in addition to providing an answer provides an explanation of the reasoning that leads to that answer has potential advantages in terms of debuggability, extensibility, and trust. To this end, we propose QED, a linguistically informed, extensible framework for explanations in question answering. A QED explanation specifies the relationship between a question and answer according to formal semantic notions such as referential equality, sentencehood, and entailment. We describe and publicly release an expert-annotated dataset of QED explanations built upon a subset of the Google Natural Questions dataset, and report baseline models on two tasks—post- hoc explanation generation given an answer, and joint question answering and explanation generation. In the joint setting, a promising result suggests that training on a relatively small amount of QED data can improve question answering. In addition to describing the formal, language-theoretic motivations for the QED approach, we describe a large user study showing that the presence of QED explanations significantly improves the ability of untrained raters to spot errors made by a strong neural QA baseline.

Recent progress in the task of Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) has been driven by addressing data sparsity, both through new methods for generating large and noisy pretraining data and through the publication of small and higher-quality finetuning data in the BEA-2019 shared task. Building upon recent work in Neural Machine Translation (NMT), we make use of both kinds of data by deriving example-level scores on our large pretraining data based on a smaller, higher-quality dataset. In this work, we perform an empirical study to discover how to best incorporate delta-log-perplexity, a type of example scoring, into a training schedule for GEC. In doing so, we perform experiments that shed light on the function and applicability of delta-log-perplexity. Models trained on scored data achieve state- of-the-art results on common GEC test sets.

We present the Natural Questions corpus, a question answering data set. Questions consist of real anonymized, aggregated queries issued to the Google search engine. An annotator is presented with a question along with a Wikipedia page from the top 5 search results, and annotates a long answer (typically a paragraph) and a short answer (one or more entities) if present on the page, or marks null if no long/short answer is present. The public release consists of 307,373 training examples with single annotations; 7,830 examples with 5-way annotations for development data; and a further 7,842 examples with 5-way annotated sequestered as test data. We present experiments validating quality of the data. We also describe analysis of 25-way annotations on 302 examples, giving insights into human variability on the annotation task. We introduce robust metrics for the purposes of evaluating question answering systems; demonstrate high human upper bounds on these metrics; and establish baseline results using competitive methods drawn from related literature.