Papers with answer extraction
Learning to Search in Long Documents Using Document Structure (C18-1)
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| Challenge: | Reading comprehension models are dominated by recurrent neural networks (RNNs) as documents become longer and questions become complex, sequential reading becomes a significant bottleneck. |
| Approach: | They propose a reading comprehension framework that uses document trees to model an agent that interleaves quick navigation with more expensive answer extraction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves question answering performance compared to existing models and has a strong information-retrieval baseline. |
Extractive NarrativeQA with Heuristic Pre-Training (D19-58)
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| Challenge: | Automated question answering (QA) from text remains a challenge for humans . a striking gap exists between machine and human performance on NLP tasks . |
| Approach: | They propose a heuristic extractive version of a data set to solve the problem of answer extraction rather than generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms previous models on summary-level QA from full narratives and on the METEOR metric. |
MapAgent: A Hierarchical Agent for Geospatial Reasoning with Dynamic Map Tool Integration (2026.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing frameworks for large language models are tailored to domains such as mathematics, coding, or web automation. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical multi-agent plug-and-play framework with customized toolsets and agentic scaffolds for map-integrated geospatial reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework decouples planning from execution and reduces cognitive load on users. |
Unveiling Internal Reasoning Modes in LLMs: A Deep Dive into Latent Reasoning vs. Factual Shortcuts with Attribute Rate Ratio (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yiran Yang, Haifeng Sun, Jingyu Wang, Qi Qi, Zirui Zhuang, Huazheng Wang, Pengfei Ren, Jing Wang, Jianxin Liao
| Challenge: | Existing research in multi-hop questions has identified two reasoning modes, but has not investigated how these modes differ during inference. |
| Approach: | They propose a classification metric that compares latent reasoning and factual shortcuts in multi-hop questions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed metric achieves 90% accuracy on the proposed datasets and demonstrates effectiveness in RAG conflict scenarios. |
SYGMA: A System for Generalizable and Modular Question Answering Over Knowledge Bases (2022.findings-emnlp)
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Sumit Neelam, Udit Sharma, Hima Karanam, Shajith Ikbal, Pavan Kapanipathi, Ibrahim Abdelaziz, Nandana Mihindukulasooriya, Young-Suk Lee, Santosh Srivastava, Cezar Pendus, Saswati Dana, Dinesh Garg, Achille Fokoue, G P Shrivatsa Bhargav, Dinesh Khandelwal, Srinivas Ravishankar, Sairam Gurajada, Maria Chang, Rosario Uceda-Sosa, Salim Roukos, Alexander Gray, Guilherme Lima, Ryan Riegel, Francois Luus, L V Subramaniam
| Challenge: | Knowledge Base Question Answering (KBQA) systems have limited generalizability across knowledge bases and multiple reasoning types. |
| Approach: | They propose a modular approach for KBQA that is built on a framework adaptable to multiple knowledge bases and reasoning types. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach is generalized across multiple knowledge bases and reasoning types. |
MMCoQA: Conversational Question Answering over Text, Tables, and Images (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing conversational QA systems only use a single knowledge source, e.g., paragraphs or knowledge graph, and assume it contains enough evidence to extract answers to users' questions. |
| Approach: | They propose a task to answer users' questions with multimodal knowledge sources via multi-turn conversations using a multimodal dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task brings a series of research challenges, including but not limited to priority, consistency, and complementarity of multimodal knowledge. |
What Makes Reading Comprehension Questions Easier? (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that questions require a deeper understanding of language to answer beyond using superficial cues. |
| Approach: | They propose to use simple heuristics to split MRC datasets into easy and hard subsets and manually annotate questions from each subset with validity and reasoning skills to investigate which skills explain the difference between easy and harder questions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better for hard and easy questions than for easy questions. |
End-to-End Training of Neural Retrievers for Open-Domain Question Answering (2021.acl-long)
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Devendra Sachan, Mostofa Patwary, Mohammad Shoeybi, Neel Kant, Wei Ping, William L. Hamilton, Bryan Catanzaro
| Challenge: | Recent work on training neural retrievers for open-domain question answering (OpenQA) has employed both supervised and unsupervised methods. |
| Approach: | They propose an approach of unsupervised pre-training with the Inverse Cloze Task and masked salient spans followed by supervised finetuning using question-context pairs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms models like REALM and RAG in retrieval accuracy and answer extraction. |
QPaug: Question and Passage Augmentation for Open-Domain Question Answering of LLMs (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to augmented generation of retrieved passages rely on the quality of a question's retrieved information. |
| Approach: | They propose a simple yet efficient method called question and passage augmentation via LLMs for open-domain QA. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art and achieves significant performance gain over existing methods. |
Machine Reading Comprehension using Case-based Reasoning (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Dung Thai, Dhruv Agarwal, Mudit Chaudhary, Wenlong Zhao, Rajarshi Das, Jay-Yoon Lee, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Manzil Zaheer, Andrew McCallum
| Challenge: | Current state-of-the-art machine readers do not support case-based reasoning . |
| Approach: | They propose a method that extracts a set of similar cases from a nonparametric memory and then predicts an answer by selecting the span in the test context that is most similar to the contextualized representations of answers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines on NaturalQuestions and NewsQA by 11.5 and 8.4 EM. |
Lite Unified Modeling for Discriminative Reading Comprehension (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | generative and discriminative MRCs focus on answer generation, extractive MRC on answer extraction. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight POS-Enhanced Iterative Co-Attention Network to handle diverse discriminative MRC tasks synchronously. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on four discriminative MRC benchmarks. |
Synthetic QA Corpora Generation with Roundtrip Consistency (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for generating synthetic question answering corpora are not suitable for QA, but can be constructed from widely available natural text. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for generating synthetic question answering corpora by combining question generation and answer extraction models and filtering the results to ensure roundtrip consistency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves exact match and F1 at less than 0.1% and 0.4% from human performance on SQuAD2 and NQ. |
Right Answer, Wrong Score: Uncovering the Inconsistencies of LLM Evaluation in Multiple-Choice Question Answering (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Multiple-choice question answering tasks are one of the most commonly used tasks for evaluating Large Language Models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They analyze whether existing answer extraction methods are aligned with human judgment and how they are influenced by answer constraints in the prompt across different domains. |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation strategies can be inconsistent with human judgment, and can lead to inaccurate and misleading comparisons. |