Understanding the decision-making processes of large language models (LLMs) is essential for their trustworthy development and deployment. However, current interpretability methods often face challenges such as low resolution and high computational cost. To address these limitations, we propose the \textbf{Multi-Layer Attention Consistency Score (MACS)}, a novel, lightweight, and easily deployable heuristic for estimating the importance of input tokens in decoder-based models. MACS measures contributions of input tokens based on the consistency of maximal attention. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that MACS achieves a favorable trade-off between interpretability quality and computational efficiency, showing faithfulness comparable to complex techniques with a 22\% decrease in VRAM usage and 30\% reduction in latency.

--This paper presents two effective approaches for Extractive Question Answering (QA) on the Qur'an. It addresses challenges related to complex language, unique terminology, and deep meaning in the text. The second uses few-shot prompting with instruction-tuned large language models such as Gemini and DeepSeek. A specialized Arabic prompt framework is developed for span extraction. A strong post-processing system integrates subword alignment, overlap suppression, and semantic filtering. This improves precision and reduces hallucinations. Evaluations show that large language models with Arabic instructions outperform traditional fine-tuned models. The best configuration achieves a pAP@10 score of 0.637. The results confirm that prompt-based instruction tuning is effective for low-resource, semantically rich QA tasks.

Current benchmarks for Hebrew Natural Language Processing (NLP) focus mainly on morpho-syntactic tasks, neglecting the semantic dimension of language understanding. To bridge this gap, we set out to deliver a Hebrew Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) dataset, where MRC is to be realized as extractive Question Answering. The morphologically rich nature of Hebrew poses a challenge to this endeavor: the indeterminacy and non-transparency of span boundaries in morphologically complex forms lead to annotation inconsistencies, disagreements, and flaws in standard evaluation metrics. To remedy this, we devise a novel set of guidelines, a controlled crowdsourcing protocol, and revised evaluation metrics that are suitable for the morphologically rich nature of the language. Our resulting benchmark, HeQ (Hebrew QA), features 30,147 diverse question-answer pairs derived from both Hebrew Wikipedia articles and Israeli tech news. Our empirical investigation reveals that standard evaluation metrics such as F1 scores and Exact Match (EM) are not appropriate for Hebrew (and other MRLs), and we propose a relevant enhancement. In addition, our experiments show low correlation between models' performance on morpho-syntactic tasks and on MRC, which suggests that models designed for the former might underperform on semantics-heavy tasks. The development and exploration of HeQ illustrate some of the challenges MRLs pose in natural language understanding (NLU), fostering progression towards more and better NLU models for Hebrew and other MRLs.

Educational question generation (EQG) is a crucial component of intelligent educational systems, significantly aiding self-assessment, active learning, and personalized education. While EQG systems have emerged, existing datasets typically rely on predefined, carefully edited texts, failing to represent real-world classroom content, including lecture speech with a set of complementary slides. To bridge this gap, we collect a dataset of educational questions based on lectures from real-world classrooms. On this realistic dataset, we find that current methods for EQG struggle with accurately generating questions from educational videos, particularly in aligning with specific timestamps and target answers. Common challenges include selecting informative contexts from extensive transcripts and ensuring generated questions meaningfully incorporate the target answer. To address the challenges, we introduce a novel framework utilizing large language models for dynamically selecting and rewriting contexts based on target timestamps and answers. First, our framework selects contexts from both lecture transcripts and video keyframes based on answer relevance and temporal proximity. Then, we integrate the contexts selected from both modalities and rewrite them into answer-containing knowledge statements, to enhance the logical connection between the contexts and the desired answer. This approach significantly improves the quality and relevance of the generated questions. Our dataset and code are released in https://github.com/mengxiayu/COSER.

We apply a simple method to machine translate datasets with span-level annotation using the DeepL MT service and its ability to translate formatted documents. Using this method, we produce a Finnish version of the SQuAD2.0 question answering dataset and train QA retriever models on this new dataset. We evaluate the quality of the dataset and more generally the MT method through direct evaluation, indirect comparison to other similar datasets, a backtranslation experiment, as well as through the performance of downstream trained QA models. In all these evaluations, we find that the method of transfer is not only simple to use but produces consistently better translated data. Given its good performance on the SQuAD dataset, it is likely the method can be used to translate other similar span-annotated datasets for other tasks and languages as well. All code and data is available under an open license: data at HuggingFace TurkuNLP/squad_v2_fi, code on GitHub TurkuNLP/squad2-fi, and model at HuggingFace TurkuNLP/bert-base-finnish-cased-squad2.

As the cultural heritage sector increasingly adopts technologies like Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to provide more personalised search experiences and enable conversations with collections data, the demand for specialised evaluation datasets has grown. While end-to-end system testing is essential, it's equally important to assess individual components. We target the final, answering task, which is well-suited to Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC). Although existing MRC datasets address general domains, they lack the specificity needed for cultural heritage information. Unfortunately, the manual creation of such datasets is prohibitively expensive for most heritage institutions. This paper presents a cost-effective approach for generating domain-specific MRC datasets with increased difficulty using Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) from synthetic preference data. Our method leverages the performance of existing question-answering models on a subset of SQuAD to create a difficulty metric, assuming that more challenging questions are answered correctly less frequently. This research contributes: (1) A methodology for increasing question difficulty using PPO and synthetic data; (2) Empirical evidence of the method's effectiveness, including human evaluation; (3) An in-depth error analysis and study of emergent phenomena; and (4) An open-source codebase and set of three llama-2-chat adapters for reproducibility and adaptation.

The widespread availability of Question Answering (QA) datasets in English has greatly facilitated the advancement of the Natural Language Processing (NLP) field. However, the scarcity of such resources for minority languages, such as Basque, poses a substantial challenge for these communities. In this context, the translation and alignment of existing QA datasets plays a crucial role in narrowing this technological gap. This work presents EuSQuAD, the first initiative dedicated to automatically translating and aligning SQuAD2.0 into Basque, resulting in more than 142k QA examples. We demonstrate EuSQuAD's value through extensive qualitative analysis and QA experiments supported with EuSQuAD as training data. These experiments are evaluated with a new human-annotated dataset.

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.

Question-answering systems have revolutionized information retrieval, but linguistic and cultural boundaries limit their widespread accessibility. This research endeavors to bridge the gap of the absence of efficient QnA datasets in low-resource languages by translating the English Question Answering Dataset (SQuAD) using a robust data curation approach. We introduce MahaSQuAD, the first-ever full SQuAD dataset for the Indic language Marathi, consisting of 118,516 training, 11,873 validation, and 11,803 test samples. We also present a gold test set of manually verified 500 examples. Challenges in maintaining context and handling linguistic nuances are addressed, ensuring accurate translations. Moreover, as a QnA dataset cannot be simply converted into any low-resource language using translation, we need a robust method to map the answer translation to its span in the translated passage. Hence, to address this challenge, we also present a generic approach for translating SQuAD into any low-resource language. Thus, we offer a scalable approach to bridge linguistic and cultural gaps present in low-resource languages, in the realm of question-answering systems. The datasets and models are shared publicly at https://github.com/l3cube-pune/MarathiNLP .

In Open-domain Question Answering (ODQA), it is essential to discern relevant contexts as evidence and avoid spurious ones among retrieved results. The model architecture that uses concatenated multiple contexts in the decoding phase, i.e., Fusion-in-Decoder, demonstrates promising performance but generates incorrect outputs from seemingly plausible contexts. To address this problem, we propose the Multi-Granularity guided Fusion-in-Decoder (MGFiD), discerning evidence across multiple levels of granularity. Based on multi-task learning, MGFiD harmonizes passage re-ranking with sentence classification. It aggregates evident sentences into an anchor vector that instructs the decoder. Additionally, it improves decoding efficiency by reusing the results of passage re-ranking for passage pruning. Through our experiments, MGFiD outperforms existing models on the Natural Questions (NQ) and TriviaQA (TQA) datasets, highlighting the benefits of its multi-granularity solution.