SdQuAD: A Large Benchmark Question Answering Dataset for Low-resource Sindhi Language

Wazir Ali, Muhammad Rafay Shaikh, Nadia Ali, Amar Rehman


Abstract
Question answering (QA) datasets are crucial for developing and evaluating monolingual and multilingual language models, yet low-resource languages like Sindhi lack open-source QA resources. We introduce SdQuAD, a novel open-source textual QA dataset for the low-resource Sindhi language, comprising 15,000 QA pairs meticulously annotated by native speakers using the Label Studio platform. Sourced from diverse domains, including news, history, science, geography, business, and tourism, SdQuAD supports both extractive and abstractive QA tasks while capturing Sindhi’s linguistic and topical diversity. We assess annotation quality using span-level agreement and evaluate extractive performance with Exact Match (EM), F1 score, and a TF-IDF baseline. Additionally, we fine-tune mBERT, XLM-R, and mT5 models on SdQuAD, benchmarking their performance to demonstrate the dataset’s utility.
Anthology ID:
2026.resourceful-4.6
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on the Role of Resources in the Age of Large Language Models (RESOURCEFUL 2026)
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma, Mallorca (Spain)
Editors:
Felix Morger, Nikolai Ilinykh, Barbara Scalvini, Simon Dobnik, Dana Dannélls
Venues:
RESOURCEFUL | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
55–61
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-ws-resourceful-06
DOI:
10.63317/3dhhfxeoztgo
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Wazir Ali, Muhammad Rafay Shaikh, Nadia Ali, and Amar Rehman. 2026. SdQuAD: A Large Benchmark Question Answering Dataset for Low-resource Sindhi Language. In Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on the Role of Resources in the Age of Large Language Models (RESOURCEFUL 2026), pages 55–61, Palma, Mallorca (Spain). ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
SdQuAD: A Large Benchmark Question Answering Dataset for Low-resource Sindhi Language (Ali et al., RESOURCEFUL 2026)
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