A4 Refereed article in a conference publication
Finnish SQuAD: A Simple Approach to Machine Translation of Span Annotations
Authors: Nuutinen, Emil; Rastas, Iiro; Ginter, Filip
Editors: Johansson, Richard; Stymne, Sara
Conference name: Nordic Conference on Computational Linguistics and Baltic Conference on Human Language Technologies
Publisher: University of Tartu Library
Publication year: 2025
Journal: NEALT proceedings series
Book title : Proceedings of the Joint 25th Nordic Conference on Computational Linguistics and 11th Baltic Conference on Human Language Technologies (NoDaLiDa/Baltic-HLT 2025)
Volume: 57
First page : 424
Last page: 432
ISBN: 978-9908-53-109-0
ISSN: 1736-8197
eISSN: 1736-6305
Publication's open availability at the time of reporting: Open Access
Publication channel's open availability : Open Access publication channel
Web address : https://aclanthology.org/2025.nodalida-1.46/
Self-archived copy’s web address: https://research.utu.fi/converis/portal/detail/Publication/506499977
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.
Downloadable publication This is an electronic reprint of the original article. |
Funding information in the publication:
The research was supported by the Research Council of Finland funding.