Papers with Machine Reading Comprehension
Read and Comprehend by Gated-Attention Reader with More Belief (N18-4)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to read comprehension using gated-attention have been effective . collaborative gating and self-belief aggregation are proposed to address these assumptions . |
| Approach: | They propose to use a document-to-query attention system to gate token encodings of a query . they conjecture that query tokens other than the cloze token may be informative . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approaches advance the state-of-the-art results in CNN, Daily Mail, and Who Did What public test sets. |
Cut to the Chase: A Context Zoom-in Network for Reading Comprehension (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Recent deep-learning based models suffer from reasoning over long documents and do not trivially generalize to cases where the answer is not present as a span. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel context zoom-in network (ConZNet) that can skip through irrelevant parts of a document and generate an answer using only the relevant regions of text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture outperforms state-of-the-art results by 12.62% (ROUGE-L) relative improvement on the recently proposed and challenging RC dataset ‘NarrativeQA’. |
VlogQA: Task, Dataset, and Baseline Models for Vietnamese Spoken-Based Machine Reading Comprehension (2024.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing datasets for machine reading comprehension tasks in Vietnamese focus on written documents, such as Wikipedia articles, online newspapers, or textbooks. |
| Approach: | They propose to capture Vietnamese spoken language in natural settings and use it to create a machine-learning corpus for machine reading comprehension tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed corpus consists of 10,076 question-answer pairs based on 1,230 transcript documents sourced from YouTube . |
Why Machine Reading Comprehension Models Learn Shortcuts? (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies show that many MRC models learn shortcuts to outwit benchmarks, but the performance is unsatisfactory in real-world applications. |
| Approach: | They propose to use shortcut questions to analyze learning difficulty of MRC models . they propose to analyze the learning difficulty regarding shortcut and challenging questions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods show that a large proportion of shortcut questions in training data make models rely on shortcut tricks excessively. |
TORQUE: A Reading Comprehension Dataset of Temporal Ordering Questions (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Current machine reading comprehension benchmarks have no questions that test temporal phenomena . a new study studies reading comprehension for temporal relations . |
| Approach: | They propose a reading comprehension benchmark built on news snippets and 21k human-generated questions querying temporal relationships. |
| Outcome: | The new reading comprehension benchmark TORQUE achieves an exact-match score of 51% on the test set . the benchmark is built on 3.2k news snippets with 21k human-generated questions . |
Entity Tracking Improves Cloze-style Reading Comprehension (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Recent work on reading comprehension tasks has improved with simple approaches, but still trail human performance. |
| Approach: | They propose to add additional entity features and a multi-task tracking objective to improve model performance . they compare the model's predictions with those of more complicated models . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the current state of the art on the LAMBADA dataset by 8 pts. |
TIE: Topological Information Enhanced Structural Reading Comprehension on Web Pages (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for structural reading comprehension (SRC) only focus on comprehension of plain text, tables, tables or knowledge bases. |
| Approach: | They propose a topological information enhanced model which transforms a token-level task into a tag-level one by introducing a two-stage process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines and achieves state-of-the-art performance on the web-based SRC benchmark WebSRC at the time of writing. |
RoR: Read-over-Read for Long Document Machine Reading Comprehension (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for machine reading comprehension are limited to individual chunks due to encoding length constraint. |
| Approach: | They propose a read-over-read method that expands the reading field from chunk to document by predicting regional answers for each chunk. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on QuAC and TriviaQA show that the proposed model performs well for long document reading. |
Cross-Lingual Machine Reading Comprehension (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on machine reading comprehension task is focused on English, but there are few efforts on other languages due to the lack of large-scale training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a cross-lingual machine reading comprehension task for other languages . they propose cloze-style reading comprehension and various neural network approaches . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves reading comprehension performance of Chinese datasets over state-of-the-art systems by a large margin over existing systems. |
Fine-Grained Prediction of Reading Comprehension from Eye Movements (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | a new study attempts to assess reading comprehension from eye movements in reading . eye movements provide small improvements over a text-only baseline, the authors argue . |
| Approach: | They propose to use eyetracking data to predict reading comprehension of a single participant . they use a battery of recent models and three new multimodal language models . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can predict reading comprehension of a single participant from eye movements over a paragraph. |
What If Sentence-hood is Hard to Define: A Case Study in Chinese Reading Comprehension (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Explicit Span-Sentence Predication solves location unit ambiguity problem in many languages, allowing model to determine which sentence contains the answer span when sentence itself has not been clearly defined at all. |
| Approach: | They propose a machine-learning reader with Explicit Span-Sentence Predication to solve this problem by analyzing Chinese sentences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed reader achieves state-of-the-art on Chinese MRC benchmark and shows great potential in dealing with other languages. |
Token-level Dynamic Self-Attention Network for Multi-Passage Reading Comprehension (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Multi-passage reading comprehension requires the ability to combine cross-passages information and reason over multiple passages to infer the answer. |
| Approach: | They propose a Dynamic Self-attention Network (DynSAN) which processes cross-passage information at token-level and meanwhile avoids substantial computational costs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on the SearchQA, Quasar-T and WikiHop datasets and further ablation validates the effectiveness of its components. |
MemoReader: Large-Scale Reading Comprehension through Neural Memory Controller (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to machine reading comprehension are limited in understanding, up to a few paragraphs, failing to comprehend lengthy documents. |
| Approach: | They propose a deep neural network architecture to handle a long-range dependency in RC tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods especially for lengthy documents. |
Automatic learner summary assessment for reading comprehension (N19-1)
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| Challenge: | Summarization is a well-established method of measuring reading proficiency in traditional English as a second or other language assessments. |
| Approach: | They propose three approaches to automatically assess learner summary for evaluating non-native reading comprehension using a summarization task and a long-term memory model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models outperform traditional methods and produce quality assessments close to professional examiners. |
Clinical Reading Comprehension: A Thorough Analysis of the emrQA Dataset (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Medical professionals often query over clinical notes to find information that can support their decision making. |
| Approach: | They propose to use expert-annotated question templates and existing i2b2 annotations to create emrQA, the first large-scale dataset for question answering based on clinical notes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can answer clinical questions without using domain knowledge. |
BioRead: A New Dataset for Biomedical Reading Comprehension (L18-1)
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| Challenge: | BioRead is a publicly available cloze-style biomedical machine reading comprehension (MRC) dataset with 16.4 million passage-question instances. |
| Approach: | They propose to build a cloze-style biomedical machine reading comprehension (MRC) dataset with 16.4 million passage-question instances. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines on bioReadLite and bioASQ, and is currently the best on BioReadLite. |
IDK-MRC: Unanswerable Questions for Indonesian Machine Reading Comprehension (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing MRC datasets in Indonesian are inadequate because of the small size and limited question types. |
| Approach: | They propose to combine automatic and manual unanswerable question generation to minimize the cost of manual dataset construction while maintaining the dataset quality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset significantly improves the performance of Indonesian MRC models, showing a large improvement for unanswerable questions. |
Simple and Effective Curriculum Pointer-Generator Networks for Reading Comprehension over Long Narratives (P19-1)
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Yi Tay, Shuohang Wang, Anh Tuan Luu, Jie Fu, Minh C. Phan, Xingdi Yuan, Jinfeng Rao, Siu Cheung Hui, Aston Zhang
| Challenge: | Using a pointer-generator framework for reading/sampling over large documents, we propose a framework for learning over long narratives where documents easily span over thousands of tokens. |
| Approach: | They propose a curriculum learning (CL) based pointer-generator framework for reading/sampling over large documents, enabling diverse training of the neural model based on the notion of alternating contextual difficulty. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on the NarrativeQA reading comprehension benchmark and reaches state-of-the-art performance. |
Summarize-then-Answer: Generating Concise Explanations for Multi-hop Reading Comprehension (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent approaches to multi-hop Reading Comprehension (RC) have greatly improved its explainability, models ability to explain their own answers. |
| Approach: | They propose to generate a question-focused abstractive summary of input paragraphs and feed it to an RC system. |
| Outcome: | The proposed explanation generates more compact explanations than an extractive explainer with limited supervision while maintaining sufficiency. |
It Is Not About What You Say, It Is About How You Say It: A Surprisingly Simple Approach for Improving Reading Comprehension (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Experimenting with 9 large language models across 3 datasets, emphasizing the context yields superior results compared to question emphasis. |
| Approach: | They ask: How does the order of inputs affect model performance? |
| Outcome: | Experiments with 9 large language models show that emphasizing the question and context improves model performance. |
STARC: Structured Annotations for Reading Comprehension (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | STARC is an annotation framework for reading comprehension with multiple choice questions . existing annotation frameworks have limited support for reading behavior analyses . |
| Approach: | They propose a new annotation framework for assessing reading comprehension with multiple choice questions . they use a span ablation dataset to demonstrate that it can be leveraged for a key new application . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be leveraged for a key new application for SAT-like reading comprehension materials. |
How Much Reading Does Reading Comprehension Require? A Critical Investigation of Popular Benchmarks (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Recent research addresses reading comprehension, where examples consist of (question, passage, answer) tuples. |
| Approach: | They establish sensible baselines for bAbI, SQuAD, CBT, CNN and Who-did-What datasets and compare them to their previous work. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models perform on 14 out of 20 bAbI, SQuAD, CBT, CNN and Who-did-What datasets. |
A Span-Extraction Dataset for Chinese Machine Reading Comprehension (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing reading comprehension datasets are mostly in English . MRC is a new field of research that aims to comprehend the context of articles and answer the questions based on them. |
| Approach: | They propose a Span-Extraction dataset for Chinese machine reading comprehension to add language diversities to existing reading comprehension datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is composed of 20,000 real questions annotated on Wikipedia paragraphs by human experts. |
Multi-hop Reading Comprehension through Question Decomposition and Rescoring (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing systems for multi-hop reading comprehension decompose compositional questions into simpler sub-questions . authors propose a system that learns to break compositional multi- hop questions into simple singlehop sub-question . |
| Approach: | They propose a system that decomposes a compositional question into simpler sub-questions . they propose recast subquestion generation as a span prediction problem . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system generates as effective as human-authored sub-questions using 400 examples . it also provides explainable evidence for its decision making in the form of sub-questions . |
Interactive Fiction Game Playing as Multi-Paragraph Reading Comprehension with Reinforcement Learning (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Interactive Fiction (IF) games with real human-written natural language texts provide a new natural evaluation for language understanding techniques. |
| Approach: | They propose to re-formulate IF game solving as Multi-Passage Reading Comprehension tasks using context-query attention mechanisms and structured prediction to efficiently generate and evaluate action outputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods achieve high winning rates and low data requirements on the recent IF benchmark (Jericho) |
To Test Machine Comprehension, Start by Defining Comprehension (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to machine reading comprehension do not adequately define comprehension, authors argue . authors argue that existing systems are not up to the task of narrative understanding as they define it . |
| Approach: | They propose a detailed definition of comprehension for short narratives . they argue existing systems are not up to the task of narrative understanding . |
| Outcome: | The proposed task definitions suggest existing systems are not up to the task of narrative understanding as they define it. |
Developing Dataset of Japanese Slot Filling Quizzes Designed for Evaluation of Machine Reading Comprehension (2020.lrec-1)
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| Challenge: | a novel dataset of slot filling quizzes is developed for evaluation of machine reading comprehension . the dataset consists of quizzed characters of target books as slots . |
| Approach: | They develop a Japanese dataset of slot filling quizzes for machine reading comprehension . they define each quiz as a 4-tuple: context passage, query holding a slot, answer character and set of possible answer characters . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset includes a 4-tuple quiz, a context passage, q and a query . the q&a is performed on characters of target books, which play important roles in narrative texts . |
A linguistically-motivated evaluation methodology for unraveling model’s abilities in reading comprehension tasks (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models fail for linguistic characteristics of input examples, despite the impressive quantity of scientific studies dedicated to them, the capabilities, limitations, and risks of these models remain largely unknown. |
| Approach: | They propose to use semantic frame annotation to characterize examples by a small number of complexity factors to account for model’s difficulty. |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation methodology is based on the intuition that certain examples consistently yield lower scores regardless of model size or architecture. |
SciMRC: Multi-perspective Scientific Machine Reading Comprehension (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing datasets focused on single-perspective question-answer pairs overlooking inherent variation in comprehension levels among different readers. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-perspective scientific machine reading comprehension dataset . their dataset comprises 741 scientific papers and 6,057 question-answer pairs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset includes questions from beginners, students, and experts. |
A Multi-Agent Framework for Feature-Constrained Difficulty Control in Reading Comprehension Item Generation (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for difficulty-controlled reading comprehension item generation rely on a single agent prompting approach. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent framework for Feature-constrained Item Generation where multiple LLM agents collaborate to generate and iteratively revise items based on intended constraints. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method generates items with monotonically increasing difficulty at higher rates than baselines. |