The rapid evolution of Natural Language Processing (NLP) has favored major languages such as English, leaving a significant gap for many others due to limited resources. This is especially evident in the context of data annotation, a task whose importance cannot be underestimated, but which is time-consuming and costly. Thus, any dataset for resource-poor languages is precious, in particular when it is task-specific. Here, we explore the feasibility of repurposing existing datasets for a new NLP task: we repurposed the Belebele dataset (Bandarkar et al., 2023), which was designed for multiple-choice question answering (MCQA), to enable extractive QA (EQA) in the style of machine reading comprehension. We present annotation guidelines and a parallel EQA dataset for English and Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). We also present QA evaluation results for several monolingual and cross-lingual QA pairs including English, MSA, and five Arabic dialects. Our aim is to enable others to adapt our approach for the 120+ other language variants in Belebele, many of which are deemed under-resourced. We also conduct a thorough analysis and share our insights from the process, which we hope will contribute to a deeper understanding of the challenges and the opportunities associated with task reformulation in NLP research.

我们重新利用Belebele数据集，将其用于机器阅读理解中的抽取式问答任务，从而解决资源匮乏语言中的数据标注问题，并为英语和现代标准阿拉伯语（MSA）提供了平行的抽取式问答数据集，并在多种单语和跨语言的问答对中进行了评估和分析。

多项选择数据集能否用于抽取式问答？