# Tourism Question Answer System in Indian Language using Domain-Adapted Foundation Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.23235 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.23235/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 23 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Nov 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [SQuAD: 100,000+ Questions for Machine Comprehension of Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05250/) (2016)
- [Reading Wikipedia to Answer Open-Domain Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00051/) (2017)
- [RealTime QA: What's the Answer Right Now?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.13332/) (2022)
- [Samanantar: The Largest Publicly Available Parallel Corpora Collection for 11 Indic Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05596/) (2021)
- [HashNet: Deep Learning to Hash by Continuation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.00758/) (2017)
- [Learning Dense Representations of Phrases at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12624/) (2020)
- [Template-Based Question Generation from Retrieved Sentences for Improved Unsupervised Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11892/) (2020)
- [L3Cube-HindBERT and DevBERT: Pre-Trained BERT Transformer models for Devanagari based Hindi and Marathi Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11418/) (2022)
- [INDIC QA BENCHMARK: A Multilingual Benchmark to Evaluate Question Answering capability of LLMs for Indic Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.13522/) (2024)
- [Syn-QG: Syntactic and Shallow Semantic Rules for Question Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.08694/) (2020)
- [A Comparison of LLM Finetuning Methods & Evaluation Metrics with Travel Chatbot Use Case](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03562/) (2024)
- [Breaking Language Barriers: A Question Answering Dataset for Hindi and Marathi](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09862/) (2023)
- [Question answering using deep learning in low resource Indian language Marathi](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.15779/) (2023)
- [Zero-Shot Prompting and Few-Shot Fine-Tuning: Revisiting Document Image Classification Using Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13859/) (2024)
- [Multilingual State Space Models for Structured Question Answering in Indic Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.01673/) (2025)
- [Extractive Question Answering on Queries in Hindi and Tamil](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06356/) (2022)
- [TOP-Training: Target-Oriented Pretraining for Medical Extractive Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16995/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [BhashaSutra: A Task-Centric Unified Survey of Indian NLP Datasets, Corpora, and Resources](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.18423/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This article presents the first comprehensive study on designing a baseline extractive question-answering (QA) system for the Hindi tourism domain, with a specialized focus on the Varanasi-a cultural and spiritual hub renowned for its Bhakti-Bhaav (devotional ethos). Targeting ten tourism-centric subdomains-Ganga Aarti, Cruise, Food Court, Public Toilet, Kund, Museum, General, Ashram, Temple and Travel, the work addresses the absence of language-specific QA resources in Hindi for culturally nuanced applications. In this paper, a dataset comprising 7,715 Hindi QA pairs pertaining to Varanasi tourism was constructed and subsequently augmented with 27,455 pairs generated via Llama zero-shot prompting. We propose a framework leveraging foundation models-BERT and RoBERTa, fine-tuned using Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), to optimize parameter efficiency and task performance. Multiple variants of BERT, including pre-trained languages (e.g., Hindi-BERT), are evaluated to assess their suitability for low-resource domain-specific QA. Evaluation metrics - F1, BLEU, and ROUGE-L - highlight trade-offs between answer precision and linguistic fluency. Experiments demonstrate that LoRA-based fine-tuning achieves competitive performance (85.3% F1) while reducing trainable parameters by 98% compared to SFT, striking a balance between efficiency and accuracy. Comparative analysis across models reveals that RoBERTa with SFT outperforms BERT variants in capturing contextual nuances, particularly for culturally embedded terms (e.g., Aarti, Kund). This work establishes a foundational baseline for Hindi tourism QA systems, emphasizing the role of LORA in low-resource settings and underscoring the need for culturally contextualized NLP frameworks in the tourism domain.