  Multilingual pre-trained models are able to zero-shot transfer knowledge from
rich-resource to low-resource languages in machine reading comprehension (MRC).
However, inherent linguistic discrepancies in different languages could make
answer spans predicted by zero-shot transfer violate syntactic constraints of
the target language. In this paper, we propose a novel multilingual MRC
framework equipped with a Siamese Semantic Disentanglement Model (SSDM) to
disassociate semantics from syntax in representations learned by multilingual
pre-trained models. To explicitly transfer only semantic knowledge to the
target language, we propose two groups of losses tailored for semantic and
syntactic encoding and disentanglement. Experimental results on three
multilingual MRC datasets (i.e., XQuAD, MLQA, and TyDi QA) demonstrate the
effectiveness of our proposed approach over models based on mBERT and XLM-100.
Code is available at:https://github.com/wulinjuan/SSDM_MRC.
