Machine reading comprehension is a natural language understanding task where the computing system is required to read a text and then find the answer to a specific question posed by a human. Large-scale and high-quality corpora are necessary for evaluating machine reading comprehension models. Furthermore, machine reading comprehension (MRC) for the health sector has potential for practical applications; nevertheless, MRC research in this domain is currently scarce. This article presents UIT-ViNewsQA, a new corpus for the Vietnamese language to evaluate MRC models for the healthcare textual domain. The corpus consists of 22,057 human-generated question-answer pairs. Crowd-workers create the questions and answers on a collection of 4,416 online Vietnamese healthcare news articles, where the answers are textual spans extracted from the corresponding articles. We introduce a process for creating a high-quality corpus for the Vietnamese machine reading comprehension task. Linguistically, our corpus accommodates diversity in question and answer types. In addition, we conduct experiments and compare the effectiveness of different MRC methods based on the neural networks and transformer architectures. Experimental results on our corpus show that the MRC system based on ALBERT architecture outperforms the neural network architectures and the BERT-based approach, an exact match score of 65.26% and an F1-score of 84.89%. The best machine model achieves about 10.90% F1-score less efficiently than humans, which proves that exploring machine models on UIT-ViNewsQA to surpass humans is challenging for researchers in the future. Our corpus is publicly available on our website: http://nlp.uit.edu.vn/datasets for research purposes.

Although Vietnamese is the 17th most popular native-speaker languagea in the world, there are not many research studies on Vietnamese machine reading comprehension (MRC), the task of understanding a text and answering questions about it. One of the reasons is because of the lack of high-quality benchmark datasets for this task. In this work, we construct a dataset which consists of 2,783 pairs of multiple-choice questions and answers based on 417 Vietnamese texts which are commonly used for teaching reading comprehension for elementary school pupils. In addition, we propose a lexicalbased MRC method that utilizes semantic similarity measures and external knowledge sources to analyze questions and extract answers from the given text.We compare the performance of the proposed model with several baseline lexical-based and neural network-based models. Our proposed method achieves 61.81% by accuracy, which is 5.51% higher than the best baseline model. We also measure human performance on our dataset and find that there is a big gap between machine-model and human performances. This indicates that significant progress can be made on this task. The dataset is freely available on our websiteb for research purposes. ahttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_native_speakers bhttps://sites.google.com/uit.edu.vn/uit-nlp/datasets-projects.

Visual Question Answering (VQA) is a challenging task of natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision (CV), attracting significant attention from researchers. English is a resource-rich language that has witnessed various developments in datasets and models for visual question answering. Visual question answering in other languages also would be developed for resources and models. In addition, there is no multilingual dataset targeting the visual content of a particular country with its own objects and cultural characteristics. To address the weakness, we provide the research community with a benchmark dataset named EVJVQA, including 33,000+ pairs of question-answer over three languages: Vietnamese, English, and Japanese, on approximately 5,000 images taken from Vietnam for evaluating multilingual VQA systems or models. EVJVQA is used as a benchmark dataset for the challenge of multilingual visual question answering at the 9th Workshop on Vietnamese Language and Speech Processing (VLSP 2022). This task attracted 62 participant teams from various universities and organizations. In this article, we present details of the organization of the challenge, an overview of the methods employed by shared-task participants, and the results. The highest performances are 0.4392 in F1-score and 0.4009 in BLUE on the private test set. The multilingual QA systems proposed by the top 2 teams use ViT for the pre-trained vision model and mT5 for the pre-trained language model, a powerful pre-trained language model based on the transformer architecture. EVJVQA is a challenging dataset that motivates NLP and CV researchers to further explore the multilingual models or systems for visual question answering systems.