GYM at Qur’an QA 2023 Shared Task: Multi-Task Transfer Learning for Quranic Passage Retrieval and Question Answering with Large Language Models

AbstractThis work addresses the challenges of question answering for vintage texts like the Quran. It introduces two tasks: passage retrieval and reading comprehension. For passage retrieval, it employs unsupervised fine-tuning sentence encoders and supervised multi-task learning. In reading comprehension, it fine-tunes an Electra-based model, demonstrating significant improvements over baseline models. Our best AraElectra model achieves 46.1% partial Average Precision (pAP) on the unseen test set, outperforming the baseline by 23%.