WebSRC: A Dataset for Web-Based Structural Reading Comprehension

Xingyu Chen, Zihan Zhao, Lu Chen, JiaBao Ji, Danyang Zhang, Ao Luo, Yuxuan Xiong, Kai Yu


Abstract
Web search is an essential way for humans to obtain information, but it’s still a great challenge for machines to understand the contents of web pages. In this paper, we introduce the task of web-based structural reading comprehension. Given a web page and a question about it, the task is to find an answer from the web page. This task requires a system not only to understand the semantics of texts but also the structure of the web page. Moreover, we proposed WebSRC, a novel Web-based Structural Reading Comprehension dataset. WebSRC consists of 400K question-answer pairs, which are collected from 6.4K web pages with corresponding HTML source code, screenshots, and metadata. Each question in WebSRC requires a certain structural understanding of a web page to answer, and the answer is either a text span on the web page or yes/no. We evaluate various strong baselines on our dataset to show the difficulty of our task. We also investigate the usefulness of structural information and visual features. Our dataset and baselines have been publicly available.
Anthology ID:
2021.emnlp-main.343
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2021
Address:
Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
Editors:
Marie-Francine Moens, Xuanjing Huang, Lucia Specia, Scott Wen-tau Yih
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4173–4185
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.343
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-main.343
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xingyu Chen, Zihan Zhao, Lu Chen, JiaBao Ji, Danyang Zhang, Ao Luo, Yuxuan Xiong, and Kai Yu. 2021. WebSRC: A Dataset for Web-Based Structural Reading Comprehension. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 4173–4185, Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
WebSRC: A Dataset for Web-Based Structural Reading Comprehension (Chen et al., EMNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.343.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.343.mp4
Data
SQuAD