FairytaleQA Translated: Enabling Educational Question and Answer Generation in Less-Resourced Languages

Question Answering (QA) datasets are crucial in assessing reading comprehension skills for both machines and humans. While numerous datasets have been developed in English for this purpose, a noticeable void exists in less-resourced languages. To alleviate this gap, our paper introduces machine-translated versions of FairytaleQA, a renowned QA dataset designed to assess and enhance narrative comprehension skills in young children. By employing fine-tuned, modest-scale models, we establish benchmarks for both Question Generation (QG) and QA tasks within the translated datasets. In addition, we present a case study proposing a model for generating question-answer pairs, with an evaluation incorporating quality metrics such as question well-formedness, answerability, relevance, and children suitability. Our evaluation prioritizes quantifying and describing error cases, along with providing directions for future work. This paper contributes to the advancement of QA and QG research in less-resourced languages, promoting accessibility and inclusivity in the development of these models for reading comprehension. The code and data is publicly available at github.com/bernardoleite/fairytaleqa-translated.

PORTULAN ExtraGLUE Datasets and Models: Kick-starting a Benchmark for the Neural Processing of Portuguese

Leveraging research on the neural modelling of Portuguese, we contribute a collection of datasets for an array of language processing tasks and a corresponding collection of fine-tuned neural language models on these downstream tasks. To align with mainstream benchmarks in the literature, originally developed in English, and to kick start their Portuguese counterparts, the datasets were machine-translated from English with a state-of-the-art translation engine. The resulting PORTULAN ExtraGLUE benchmark is a basis for research on Portuguese whose improvement can be pursued in future work. Similarly, the respective fine-tuned neural language models, developed with a low-rank adaptation approach, are made available as baselines that can stimulate future work on the neural processing of Portuguese. All datasets and models have been developed and are made available for two variants of Portuguese: European and Brazilian.

On Few-Shot Prompting for Controllable Question-Answer Generation in Narrative Comprehension

Question Generation aims to automatically generate questions based on a given input provided as context. A controllable question generation scheme focuses on generating questions with specific attributes, allowing better control. In this study, we propose a few-shot prompting strategy for controlling the generation of question-answer pairs from children's narrative texts. We aim to control two attributes: the question's explicitness and underlying narrative elements. With empirical evaluation, we show the effectiveness of controlling the generation process by employing few-shot prompting side by side with a reference model. Our experiments highlight instances where the few-shot strategy surpasses the reference model, particularly in scenarios such as semantic closeness evaluation and the diversity and coherency of question-answer pairs. However, these improvements are not always statistically significant. The code is publicly available at github.com/bernardoleite/few-shot-prompting-qg-control.

Fostering the Ecosystem of Open Neural Encoders for Portuguese with Albertina PT* Family

To foster the neural encoding of Portuguese, this paper contributes foundation encoder models that represent an expansion of the still very scarce ecosystem of large language models specifically developed for this language that are fully open, in the sense that they are open source and openly distributed for free under an open license for any purpose, thus including research and commercial usages. Like most languages other than English, Portuguese is low-resourced in terms of these foundational language resources, there being the inaugural 900 million parameter Albertina and 335 million Bertimbau. Taking this couple of models as an inaugural set, we present the extension of the ecosystem of state-of-the-art open encoders for Portuguese with a larger, top performance-driven model with 1.5 billion parameters, and a smaller, efficiency-driven model with 100 million parameters. While achieving this primary goal, further results that are relevant for this ecosystem were obtained as well, namely new datasets for Portuguese based on the SuperGLUE benchmark, which we also distribute openly.

Towards Enriched Controllability for Educational Question Generation

Question Generation (QG) is a task within Natural Language Processing (NLP) that involves automatically generating questions given an input, typically composed of a text and a target answer. Recent work on QG aims to control the type of generated questions so that they meet educational needs. A remarkable example of controllability in educational QG is the generation of questions underlying certain narrative elements, e.g., causal relationship, outcome resolution, or prediction. This study aims to enrich controllability in QG by introducing a new guidance attribute: question explicitness. We propose to control the generation of explicit and implicit wh-questions from children-friendly stories. We show preliminary evidence of controlling QG via question explicitness alone and simultaneously with another target attribute: the question's narrative element. The code is publicly available at github.com/bernardoleite/question-generation-control.