Amharic Question Answering for Biography, Definition, and Description Questions

Abstract

Question Answering (QA) returns concise answers or answer lists from natural language text given a context document. To advance robust models' development, large amounts of resources go into curating QA datasets. There is a surge of QA datasets for languages like English, however, this is not the case for Amharic. Amharic, the official language of Ethiopia, is the second most spoken Semitic language in the world. There is no published or publicly available Amharic QA dataset. Hence, to foster the research in Amharic QA, we present the first Amharic QA (AmQA) dataset. We crowdsourced 2628 question-answer pairs over 378 Wikipedia articles. Additionally, we run an XLMRLarge-based baseline model to spark opendomain QA research interest. The best-performing baseline achieves an F-score of 69.58 and 71.74 in reader-retriever QA and reading comprehension settings respectively.