A Method for the Assisted Translation of QA Datasets Using Multilingual Sentence Embeddings

Abstract: This thesis presents a method which reduces the amount of labour required to translate the English question answering dataset SQuAD into Swedish. The purpose of the study is to contribute to shrinking the gap between natural language processing research in English and research in lesser-resourced languages by providing a method for creating datasets in these languages which are counterparts to those used in English. This would allow for the results from English studies to be evaluated in more languages. The method put forward by this thesis uses multilingual sentence embeddings to search for and rank answers to English SQuAD questions in SwedishWikipedia articles associated with the question. The resulting search results are then used to pair SQuAD questions with sentences that contain their answers. We also estimate to what extent SQuAD questions have answers in the Swedish edition of Wikipedia, concluding that this proportion of questions is small but still useful in size. Further, the evaluation of the method shows that it provides a clear reduction in the labour required for translating SQuAD into Swedish, while impacting the amount of datapoints retained in a resulting translation to a degree which is acceptable for many use-cases. Manual labour is still required for translating the SQuAD questions and for locating the answers within the Swedish sentences which contain them. Researching ways to automate these processes would further increase the utility of the approach, but are outside the scope of this thesis.