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Dealing with Data Scarcity in Spoken Question Answering

This paper focuses on dealing with data scarcity in spoken question answering (QA) using automatic question-answer generation and a carefully selected fine-tuning strategy that leverages limited annotated data (paragraphs and question-answer pairs). Spoken QA is a challenging task due to using spoken documents, i.e., erroneous automatic speech recognition (ASR) transcriptions, and the scarcity of spoken QA data. We propose a framework for utilizing limited annotated data effectively to improve spoken QA performance. To deal with data scarcity, we train a question-answer generation model with annotated data and then produce large amounts of question-answer pairs from unannotated data (paragraphs). Our experiments demonstrate that incorporating limited annotated data and the automatically generated data through a carefully selected fine-tuning strategy leads to 5.5% relative F1 gain over the model trained only with annotated data. Moreover, the proposed framework is also effective in high ASR errors.