ViQA-COVID: COVID-19 Machine Reading Comprehension Dataset for Vietnamese

After two years of appearance, COVID-19 has negatively affected people and normal life around the world. As in May 2022, there are more than 522 million cases and six million deaths worldwide (including nearly ten million cases and over forty-three thousand deaths in Vietnam). Economy and society are both severely affected. The variant of COVID-19, Omicron, has broken disease prevention measures of countries and rapidly increased number of infections. Resources overloading in treatment and epidemics prevention is happening all over the world. It can be seen that, application of artificial intelligence (AI) to support people at this time is extremely necessary. There have been many studies applying AI to prevent COVID-19 which are extremely useful, and studies on machine reading comprehension (MRC) are also in it. Realizing that, we created the first MRC dataset about COVID-19 for Vietnamese: ViQA-COVID and can be used to build models and systems, contributing to disease prevention. Besides, ViQA-COVID is also the first multi-span extraction MRC dataset for Vietnamese, we hope that it can contribute to promoting MRC studies in Vietnamese and multilingual.

Understanding LLMs' Cross-Lingual Context Retrieval: How Good It Is And Where It Comes From

The ability of cross-lingual context retrieval is a fundamental aspect of cross-lingual alignment of large language models (LLMs), where the model extracts context information in one language based on requests in another language. Despite its importance in real-life applications, this ability has not been adequately investigated for state-of-the-art models. In this paper, we evaluate the cross-lingual context retrieval ability of over 40 LLMs across 12 languages to understand the source of this ability, using cross-lingual machine reading comprehension (xMRC) as a representative scenario. Our results show that several small, post-trained open LLMs show strong cross-lingual context retrieval ability, comparable to closed-source LLMs such as GPT-4o, and their estimated oracle performances greatly improve after post-training. Our interpretability analysis shows that the cross-lingual context retrieval process can be divided into two main phases: question encoding and answer retrieval, which are formed in pre-training and post-training, respectively. The phasing stability correlates with xMRC performance, and the xMRC bottleneck lies at the last model layers in the second phase, where the effect of post-training can be evidently observed. Our results also indicate that larger-scale pretraining cannot improve the xMRC performance. Instead, larger LLMs need further multilingual post-training to fully unlock their cross-lingual context retrieval potential. Our code and is available at https://github.com/NJUNLP/Cross-Lingual-Context-Retrieval

GlotEval: A Test Suite for Massively Multilingual Evaluation of Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) are advancing at an unprecedented pace globally, with regions increasingly adopting these models for applications in their primary language. Evaluation of these models in diverse linguistic environments, especially in low-resource languages, has become a major challenge for academia and industry. Existing evaluation frameworks are disproportionately focused on English and a handful of high-resource languages, thereby overlooking the realistic performance of LLMs in multilingual and lower-resource scenarios. To address this gap, we introduce GlotEval, a lightweight framework designed for massively multilingual evaluation. Supporting seven key tasks (machine translation, text classification, summarization, open-ended generation, reading comprehension, sequence labeling, and intrinsic evaluation), spanning over dozens to hundreds of languages, GlotEval highlights consistent multilingual benchmarking, language-specific prompt templates, and non-English-centric machine translation. This enables a precise diagnosis of model strengths and weaknesses in diverse linguistic contexts. A multilingual translation case study demonstrates GlotEval's applicability for multilingual and language-specific evaluations.

Locations of Characters in Narratives: Andersen and Persuasion Datasets

The ability of machines to grasp spatial understanding within narrative contexts is an intriguing aspect of reading comprehension that continues to be studied. Motivated by the goal to test the AI's competence in understanding the relationship between characters and their respective locations in narratives, we introduce two new datasets: Andersen and Persuasion. For the Andersen dataset, we selected fifteen children's stories from "Andersen's Fairy Tales" by Hans Christian Andersen and manually annotated the characters and their respective locations throughout each story. Similarly, for the Persuasion dataset, characters and their locations in the novel "Persuasion" by Jane Austen were also manually annotated. We used these datasets to prompt Large Language Models (LLMs). The prompts are created by extracting excerpts from the stories or the novel and combining them with a question asking the location of a character mentioned in that excerpt. Out of the five LLMs we tested, the best-performing one for the Andersen dataset accurately identified the location in 61.85% of the examples, while for the Persuasion dataset, the best-performing one did so in 56.06% of the cases.

Do LLMs Understand Your Translations? Evaluating Paragraph-level MT with Question Answering

Despite the steady progress in machine translation evaluation, existing automatic metrics struggle to capture how well meaning is preserved beyond sentence boundaries. We posit that reliance on a single intrinsic quality score, trained to mimic human judgments, might be insufficient for evaluating translations of long, complex passages, and a more ``pragmatic'' approach that assesses how accurately key information is conveyed by a translation in context is needed. We introduce TREQA (Translation Evaluation via Question-Answering), a framework that extrinsically evaluates translation quality by assessing how accurately candidate translations answer reading comprehension questions that target key information in the original source or reference texts. In challenging domains that require long-range understanding, such as literary texts, we show that TREQA is competitive with and, in some cases, outperforms state-of-the-art neural and LLM-based metrics in ranking alternative paragraph-level translations, despite never being explicitly optimized to correlate with human judgments. Furthermore, the generated questions and answers offer interpretability: empirical analysis shows that they effectively target translation errors identified by experts in evaluated datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/deep-spin/treqa

MRCEval: A Comprehensive, Challenging and Accessible Machine Reading Comprehension Benchmark

Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) is an essential task in evaluating natural language understanding. Existing MRC datasets primarily assess specific aspects of reading comprehension (RC), lacking a comprehensive MRC benchmark. To fill this gap, we first introduce a novel taxonomy that categorizes the key capabilities required for RC. Based on this taxonomy, we construct MRCEval, an MRC benchmark that leverages advanced Large Language Models (LLMs) as both sample generators and selection judges. MRCEval is a comprehensive, challenging and accessible benchmark designed to assess the RC capabilities of LLMs thoroughly, covering 13 distinct RC skills with a total of 2.1K high-quality multi-choice questions. We perform an extensive evaluation of 28 widely used open-source and proprietary models, highlighting that MRC continues to present significant challenges even in the era of LLMs.

Pay Attention to Real World Perturbations! Natural Robustness Evaluation in Machine Reading Comprehension

As neural language models achieve human-comparable performance on Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) and see widespread adoption, ensuring their robustness in real-world scenarios has become increasingly important. Current robustness evaluation research, though, primarily develops synthetic perturbation methods, leaving unclear how well they reflect real life scenarios. Considering this, we present a framework to automatically examine MRC models on naturally occurring textual perturbations, by replacing paragraph in MRC benchmarks with their counterparts based on available Wikipedia edit history. Such perturbation type is natural as its design does not stem from an arteficial generative process, inherently distinct from the previously investigated synthetic approaches. In a large-scale study encompassing SQUAD datasets and various model architectures we observe that natural perturbations result in performance degradation in pre-trained encoder language models. More worryingly, these state-of-the-art Flan-T5 and Large Language Models (LLMs) inherit these errors. Further experiments demonstrate that our findings generalise to natural perturbations found in other more challenging MRC benchmarks. In an effort to mitigate these errors, we show that it is possible to improve the robustness to natural perturbations by training on naturally or synthetically perturbed examples, though a noticeable gap still remains compared to performance on unperturbed data.

RoleMRC: A Fine-Grained Composite Benchmark for Role-Playing and Instruction-Following

Role-playing is important for Large Language Models (LLMs) to follow diverse instructions while maintaining role identity and the role's pre-defined ability limits. Existing role-playing datasets mostly contribute to controlling role style and knowledge boundaries, but overlook role-playing in instruction-following scenarios. We introduce a fine-grained role-playing and instruction-following composite benchmark, named RoleMRC, including: (1) Multi-turn dialogues between ideal roles and humans, including free chats or discussions upon given passages; (2) Role-playing machine reading comprehension, involving response, refusal, and attempts according to passage answerability and role ability; (3) More complex scenarios with nested, multi-turn and prioritized instructions. The final RoleMRC features a 10.2k role profile meta-pool, 37.9k well-synthesized role-playing instructions, and 1.4k testing samples. We develop a pipeline to quantitatively evaluate the fine-grained role-playing and instruction-following capabilities of several mainstream LLMs, as well as models that are fine-tuned on our data. Moreover, cross-evaluation on external role-playing datasets confirms that models fine-tuned on RoleMRC enhances instruction-following without compromising general role-playing and reasoning capabilities. We also probe the neural-level activation maps of different capabilities over post-tuned LLMs. Access to our RoleMRC, RoleMRC-mix and Codes: https://github.com/LuJunru/RoleMRC.

Improving Natural Language Understanding for LLMs via Large-Scale Instruction Synthesis

High-quality, large-scale instructions are crucial for aligning large language models (LLMs), however, there is a severe shortage of instruction in the field of natural language understanding (NLU). Previous works on constructing NLU instructions mainly focus on information extraction (IE), neglecting tasks such as machine reading comprehension, question answering, and text classification. Furthermore, the lack of diversity in the data has led to a decreased generalization ability of trained LLMs in other NLU tasks and a noticeable decline in the fundamental model's general capabilities. To address this issue, we propose Hum, a large-scale, high-quality synthetic instruction corpus for NLU tasks, designed to enhance the NLU capabilities of LLMs. Specifically, Hum includes IE (either close IE or open IE), machine reading comprehension, text classification, and instruction generalist tasks, thereby enriching task diversity. Additionally, we introduce a human-LLMs collaborative mechanism to synthesize instructions, which enriches instruction diversity by incorporating guidelines, preference rules, and format variants. We conduct extensive experiments on 5 NLU tasks and 28 general capability evaluation datasets for LLMs. Experimental results show that Hum enhances the NLU capabilities of six LLMs by an average of 3.1\%, with no significant decline observed in other general capabilities.

Zero-Shot Complex Question-Answering on Long Scientific Documents

With the rapid development in Transformer-based language models, the reading comprehension tasks on short documents and simple questions have been largely addressed. Long documents, specifically the scientific documents that are densely packed with knowledge discovered and developed by humans, remain relatively unexplored. These documents often come with a set of complex and more realistic questions, adding to their complexity. We present a zero-shot pipeline framework that enables social science researchers to perform question-answering tasks that are complex yet of predetermined question formats on full-length research papers without requiring machine learning expertise. Our approach integrates pre-trained language models to handle challenging scenarios including multi-span extraction, multi-hop reasoning, and long-answer generation. Evaluating on MLPsych, a novel dataset of social psychology papers with annotated complex questions, we demonstrate that our framework achieves strong performance through combination of extractive and generative models. This work advances document understanding capabilities for social sciences while providing practical tools for researchers.