The rapid evolution of Natural Language Processing (NLP) has favored major languages such as English, leaving a significant gap for many others due to limited resources. This is especially evident in the context of data annotation, a task whose importance cannot be underestimated, but which is time-consuming and costly. Thus, any dataset for resource-poor languages is precious, in particular when it is task-specific. Here, we explore the feasibility of repurposing existing datasets for a new NLP task: we repurposed the Belebele dataset (Bandarkar et al., 2023), which was designed for multiple-choice question answering (MCQA), to enable extractive QA (EQA) in the style of machine reading comprehension. We present annotation guidelines and a parallel EQA dataset for English and Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). We also present QA evaluation results for several monolingual and cross-lingual QA pairs including English, MSA, and five Arabic dialects. Our aim is to enable others to adapt our approach for the 120+ other language variants in Belebele, many of which are deemed under-resourced. We also conduct a thorough analysis and share our insights from the process, which we hope will contribute to a deeper understanding of the challenges and the opportunities associated with task reformulation in NLP research.

Much has been made about the rich and inclusive story in this year's edition of the popular Call of Duty video game franchise. That may be, but "Call of Duty: Vanguard," out Friday for PlayStation 5, PS4, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One and PCs ($59.99-up, You are part of a team of special forces soldiers trying to commandeer a German train buzzing toward Hamburg. You must dodge gunfire from Nazis on both rail lines and German military trucks buzzing between the set of tracks. Your team, led by Sgt.

The upcoming video game "Call of Duty: Vanguard" transports you back to World War II – but the latest entrant in the multibillion-selling franchises promises different perspectives of the global conflict. That diversity of perspectives is what you see deployed front and center in the main characters in the game, due out Nov. 5 for PlayStation 5, PS4, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, and PCs. Arthur Kingsley, who is Black and Russian sniper Lt. Polina Petrova, alongside squad mates Brooklyn-born pilot Wade Jackson, identified as a first-generation American, Australian explosives expert Lucas Riggs, and second-in-command Sgt. Richard Webb, who is white. This team – a precursor to the modern Special Forces units – is assembled for a mission to enter Berlin and thwart a German plan to establish a Fourth Reich.

Air power has played an increasingly important role in the Libyan conflict. The relatively flat featureless desert terrain of the north and coast means that ground units are easily spotted, with few places to hide. The air forces of both the United Nations-recognised Government of National Accord (GNA) and eastern-based commander Khalifa Haftar and his self-styled Libyan National Army (LNA) use French and Soviet-era fighter jets, antiquated and poorly maintained. While manned fighter aircraft have been used, for the most part the air war has been fought by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or drones. With nearly 1,000 air strikes conducted by UAVs, UN Special Representative to Libya Ghassan Salame called the conflict "the largest drone war in the world".