Interpreting Indirect Answers to Yes-No Questions in Multiple Languages

Zijie Wang, Md Mosharaf Hossain, Shivam Mathur, Terry Cruz Melo, Kadir Bulut Özler, Keun Hee Park, Jacob Quintero, MohammadHossein Rezaei, Shreya Nupur Shakya, Md Nayem Uddin, Eduardo Blanco

Abstract: Yes-no questions expect a yes or no for an answer, but people often skip polar keywords. Instead, they answer with long explanations that must be interpreted. In this paper, we focus on this challenging problem and release new benchmarks in eight languages. We present a distant supervision approach to collect training data, and demonstrate that direct answers (i.e., with polar keywords) are useful to train models to interpret indirect answers (i.e., without polar keywords). We show that monolingual fine-tuning is beneficial if training data can be obtained via distant supervision for the language of interest (5 languages). Additionally, we show that cross-lingual fine-tuning is always beneficial (8 languages).