# Multilingual Question Answering from Formatted Text applied to Conversational Agents Source: [Multilingual Question Answering from Formatted Text applied to Conversational Agents]() Collection index: [llms.txt]() Data updated: 2025-10-25T22:54:51.606Z Authors: Wissam Siblini, Charlotte Pasqual, Axel Lavielle, Mohamed Challal, Cyril Cauchois Published: 2019-10-10T15:44:29.000Z ## Abstract Recent advances with language models (e.g. BERT, XLNet, ...), have allowed surpassing human performance on complex NLP tasks such as Reading Comprehension. However, labeled datasets for training are available mostly in English which makes it difficult to acknowledge progress in other languages. Fortunately, models are now pre-trained on unlabeled data from hundreds of languages and exhibit interesting transfer abilities from one language to another. In this paper, we show that multilingual BERT is naturally capable of zero-shot transfer for an extractive Question Answering task (eQA) from English to other languages. More specifically, it outperforms the best previously known baseline for transfer to Japanese and French. Moreover, using a recently published large eQA French dataset, we are able to further show that (1) zero-shot transfer provides results really close to a direct training on the target language and (2) combination of transfer and training on target is the best option overall. We finally present a practical application: a multilingual conversational agent called Kate which answers to HR-related questions in several languages directly from the content of intranet pages. ## Recorded benchmark results A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage. ## Original sources and implementation [Original paper]() [PDF]()