Papers › Combining Data Generation and Active Learning for Low-Resource Question Answering

Combining Data Generation and Active Learning for Low-Resource Question Answering

27 Nov 2022arXiv:2211.14880archive 2025-07-28

Maximilian Kimmich, Andrea Bartezzaghi, Jasmina Bogojeska, Cristiano Malossi, Ngoc Thang Vu

Neural approaches have become very popular in Question Answering (QA), however, they require a large amount of annotated data. In this work, we propose a novel approach that combines data augmentation via question-answer generation with Active Learning to improve performance in low-resource settings, where the target domains are diverse in terms of difficulty and similarity to the source domain. We also investigate Active Learning for question answering in different stages, overall reducing the annotation effort of humans. For this purpose, we consider target domains in realistic settings, with an extremely low amount of annotated samples but with many unlabeled documents, which we assume can be obtained with little effort. Additionally, we assume a sufficient amount of labeled data from the source domain being available. We perform extensive experiments to find the best setup for incorporating domain experts. Our findings show that our novel approach, where humans are incorporated in a data generation approach, boosts performance in the low-resource, domain-specific setting, allowing for low-labeling-effort question answering systems in new, specialized domains. They further demonstrate how human annotation affects the performance of QA depending on the stage it is performed.

PaperPDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

mxschmdt/mrqa-gen-al officialmentioned on GitHubpytorch report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Active LearningAnswer GenerationData AugmentationQuestion AnsweringQuestion-Answer-GenerationSynthetic Data Generation

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections