metadata

annotations_creators:
  - expert-generated
language_creators:
  - found
language:
  - es
license:
  - cc-by-sa-4.0
multilinguality:
  - monolingual
pretty_name: Spanish Question Answering Corpus (SQAC)
size_categories:
  - unknown
source_datasets:
  - original
task_categories:
  - question-answering
task_ids:
  - extractive-qa

SQAC (Spanish Question-Answering Corpus): An extractive QA dataset for the Spanish language

BibTeX citation

@article{gutierrezfandino2022,
    author = {Asier Gutiérrez-Fandiño and Jordi Armengol-Estapé and Marc Pàmies and Joan Llop-Palao and Joaquin Silveira-Ocampo and Casimiro Pio Carrino and Carme Armentano-Oller and Carlos Rodriguez-Penagos and Aitor Gonzalez-Agirre and Marta Villegas},
    title = {MarIA: Spanish Language Models},
    journal = {Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural},
    volume = {68},
    number = {0},
    year = {2022},
    issn = {1989-7553},
    url = {http://journal.sepln.org/sepln/ojs/ojs/index.php/pln/article/view/6405},
    pages = {39--60}
}

See the pre-print version of our paper for further details: https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.07253

Introduction

This dataset contains 6,247 contexts and 18,817 questions with their answers, 1 to 5 for each fragment.

The sources of the contexts are:

Encyclopedic articles from Wikipedia in Spanish, used under CC-by-sa licence.
News from Wikinews in Spanish, used under CC-by licence.
Text from the Spanish corpus AnCora, which is a mix from diferent newswire and literature sources, used under CC-by licence.

This dataset can be used to build extractive-QA.

Supported Tasks and Leaderboards

Extractive-QA

Languages

ES - Spanish

Directory structure

README.md
dev.json
test.json
train.json
sqac.py

Dataset Structure

Data Instances

JSON files

Data Fields

Follows (Rajpurkar, Pranav et al., 2016) for squad v1 datasets. (see below for full reference). We added a field "source" with the source of the context.

Example

{
  "data": [
    {
      "paragraphs": [
        {
          "context": "Al cogote, y fumando como una cafetera. Ah!, no era él, éramos todos nosotros. Luego llegó Billie Holiday. Bajo el epígrafe Arte, la noche temática, pasaron la vida de la única cantante del universo que no es su voz, sino su alma lo que se escucha cuando interpreta. Gata golpeada por el mundo, pateada, violada, enganchada a todos los paraísos artificiales del planeta, jamás encontró el Edén. El Edén lo encontramos nosotros cuando, al concluir la sesión de la tele, pusimos en la doméstica cadena de sonido el mítico Last Recording, su última grabación (marzo de 1959), con la orquesta de Ray Ellis y el piano de Hank Jones. Se estaba muriendo Lady Day, y no obstante, mientras moría, su alma cantaba, Baby, won't you please come home. O sea, niño, criatura, amor, vuelve, a casa por favor.",
          "qas": [
            {
              "question": "¿Quién se incorporó a la reunión más adelante?",
              "id": "c5429572-64b8-4c5d-9553-826f867b07be",
              "answers": [
                {
                  "answer_start": 91,
                  "text": "Billie Holiday"
                }
              ]
            },
            
            ...
            
            ]
        }
      ],
      "title": "P_129_20010702_&_P_154_20010102_&_P_108_20000301_c_&_P_108_20000601_d",
      "source": "ancora"
    },
    ...
  ]
}

Data Splits

train
development
test

Content analysis

Number of articles, paragraphs and questions

Number of articles: 3,834
Number of contexts: 6,247
Number of questions: 18,817
Questions/context: 3.01
Number of sentences: 48,026
Sentences/context: 7.70

Number of tokens

Total tokens in context: 1,561,616
Tokens/context 250.30
Total tokens in questions: 203,235
Tokens in questions/questions: 10.80
Tokens in questions/tokens in context: 0.13
Total tokens in answers: 90,307
Tokens in answers/answers: 4.80
Tokens in answers/tokens in context: 0.06

Lexical variation

46.38 of the words in the Question can be found in the Context.

Question type

Question	Count	%
qué	6,381	33.91 %
quién/es	2,952	15.69 %
cuál/es	2,034	10.81 %
cómo	1,949	10.36 %
dónde	1,856	9.86 %
cuándo	1,639	8.71 %
cuánto	1,311	6.97 %
cuántos	495	2.63 %
adónde	100	0.53 %
cuánta	49	0.26 %
no question mark	43	0.23 %
cuántas	19	0.10 %

Dataset Creation

Methodology

6,247 contexts were randomly chosen from the three corpus described below. We commisioned the creation of between 1 and 5 questions for each context, following an adaptation of the guidelines from SQUAD 1.0 Rajpurkar, Pranav et al. “SQuAD: 100, 000+ Questions for Machine Comprehension of Text.” EMNLP (2016). In total, 18,817 pairs of a question and an extracted fragment that contains the answer were created.

Curation Rationale

For compatibility with similar datasets in other languages, we followed as close as possible existing curation guidelines. We also created another QA dataset with Wikipedia to ensure thematic and stylistic variety.

Source Data

Spanish Wikipedia: https://es.wikipedia.org
Spanish Wikinews: https://es.wikinews.org/
AnCora corpus: http://clic.ub.edu/corpus/en

Initial Data Collection and Normalization

The source data are scraped articles from the Spanish Wikipedia site, Wikinews site and from AnCora corpus.

Who are the source language producers?

[More Information Needed]

Annotations

Annotation process

We commissioned the creation of 1 to 5 questions for each context, following an adaptation of the guidelines from SQUAD 1.0 Rajpurkar, Pranav et al. “SQuAD: 100, 000+ Questions for Machine Comprehension of Text.” EMNLP (2016).

Who are the annotators?

Native language speakers.

Dataset Curators

Carlos Rodríguez and Carme Armentano, from BSC-CNS.

Personal and Sensitive Information

No personal or sensitive information included.

Considerations for Using the Data

Social Impact of Dataset

[More Information Needed]

Discussion of Biases

[More Information Needed]

Other Known Limitations

[More Information Needed]

Contact

Carlos Rodríguez-Penagos or Carme Armentano-Oller (plantl-gob-es@bsc.es)

Funding

This work was funded by the Spanish State Secretariat for Digitalization and Artificial Intelligence (SEDIA) within the framework of the Plan-TL.

License

This work is licensed under a Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.