Multilingual pre-trained models could leverage the training data from a rich source language (such as English) to improve the performance on low resource languages. However, the transfer effectiveness on the multilingual Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) task is substantially poorer than that for sentence classification tasks, mainly due to the requirement of MRC to detect the word level answer boundary. In this paper, we propose two auxiliary tasks to introduce additional phrase boundary supervision in the fine-tuning stage:(1) a mixed MRC task, which translates the question or passage to other languages and builds cross-lingual question-passage pairs; and (2) a language-agnostic knowledge masking task by leveraging knowledge phrases mined from the Web. Extensive experiments on two cross-lingual MRC datasets show the effectiveness of our proposed approach.

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Since the start of his journey in 1275, Marco Polo has been one of the most significant figures to promote cultural exchange between the East and the West throughout history. Instead of discussing the authenticity of Marco Polo's experiences in China, this essay focuses on finding the reasons that contributed to Marco Polo's unsuccessful attempts to spread Christianity in China during the Yuan Dynasty by concentrating on "The Travels of Marco Polo" that he wrote. Combining details from this primary source text along with contemporary documents, artwork, and Chinese culture during the Yuan Dynasty, there were many factors that prevented Christianity from spreading. In particular, this essay explores three key factors: the prevalence of Buddhism, the customs of the Chinese people, and the failure in converting emperor Khan to Christianity during the Yuan Dynasty. In conclusion, the convergence of these factors serves as the explanation for the unsuccessful popularization of Christianity during the Yuan Dynasty.

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