Finnish SQuAD: A Simple Approach to Machine Translation of Span Annotations




Nuutinen, Emil; Rastas, Iiro; Ginter, Filip

Johansson, Richard; Stymne, Sara

Nordic Conference on Computational Linguistics and Baltic Conference on Human Language Technologies

PublisherUniversity of Tartu Library

2025

 NEALT proceedings series

Proceedings of the Joint 25th Nordic Conference on Computational Linguistics and 11th Baltic Conference on Human Language Technologies (NoDaLiDa/Baltic-HLT 2025)

57

424

432

978-9908-53-109-0

1736-8197

1736-6305

https://aclanthology.org/2025.nodalida-1.46/

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.


The research was supported by the Research Council of Finland funding.


Last updated on 28/01/2026 12:31:37 PM