Pre-trained language-vision models have shown remarkable performance on the visual question answering (VQA) task. However, most pre-trained models are trained by only considering monolingual learning, especially the resource-rich language like Englis
h. Training such models for multilingual setups demand high computing resources and multilingual language-vision dataset which hinders their application in practice. To alleviate these challenges, we propose a knowledge distillation approach to extend an English language-vision model (teacher) into an equally effective multilingual and code-mixed model (student). Unlike the existing knowledge distillation methods, which only use the output from the last layer of the teacher network for distillation, our student model learns and imitates the teacher from multiple intermediate layers (language and vision encoders) with appropriately designed distillation objectives for incremental knowledge extraction. We also create the large-scale multilingual and code-mixed VQA dataset in eleven different language setups considering the multiple Indian and European languages. Experimental results and in-depth analysis show the effectiveness of the proposed VQA model over the pre-trained language-vision models on eleven diverse language setups.
This study describes the development of a Portuguese Community-Question Answering benchmark in the domain of Diabetes Mellitus using a Recognizing Question Entailment (RQE) approach. Given a premise question, RQE aims to retrieve semantically similar
, already answered, archived questions. We build a new Portuguese benchmark corpus with 785 pairs between premise questions and archived answered questions marked with relevance judgments by medical experts. Based on the benchmark corpus, we leveraged and evaluated several RQE approaches ranging from traditional information retrieval methods to novel large pre-trained language models and ensemble techniques using learn-to-rank approaches. Our experimental results show that a supervised transformer-based method trained with multiple languages and for multiple tasks (MUSE) outperforms the alternatives. Our results also show that ensembles of methods (stacking) as well as a traditional (light) information retrieval method (BM25) can produce competitive results. Finally, among the tested strategies, those that exploit only the question (not the answer), provide the best effectiveness-efficiency trade-off. Code is publicly available.
