Multilingual Question Answering from Formatted Text applied to Conversational Agents

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.