Synthetic Dataset Creation and Fine-Tuning of Transformer Models for
  Question Answering in Serbian
Aleksa Cvetanović Predrag Tadić
In this paper, we focus on generating a synthetic question answering (QA)
dataset using an adapted Translate-Align-Retrieve method. Using this method, we
created the largest Serbian QA dataset of more than 87K samples, which we name
SQuAD-sr. To acknowledge the script duality in Serbian, we generated both
Cyrillic and Latin versions of the dataset. We investigate the dataset quality
and use it to fine-tune several pre-trained QA models. Best results were
obtained by fine-tuning the BERTi\'c model on our Latin SQuAD-sr dataset,
achieving 73.91% Exact Match and 82.97% F1 score on the benchmark XQuAD
dataset, which we translated into Serbian for the purpose of evaluation. The
results show that our model exceeds zero-shot baselines, but fails to go beyond
human performance. We note the advantage of using a monolingual pre-trained
model over multilingual, as well as the performance increase gained by using
Latin over Cyrillic. By performing additional analysis, we show that questions
about numeric values or dates are more likely to be answered correctly than
other types of questions. Finally, we conclude that SQuAD-sr is of sufficient
quality for fine-tuning a Serbian QA model, in the absence of a manually
crafted and annotated dataset.