NewsQA: A Machine Comprehension Dataset

Adam Trischler, Tong Wang, Xingdi Yuan, Justin Harris, Alessandro Sordoni, Philip Bachman, Kaheer Suleman


Abstract
We present NewsQA, a challenging machine comprehension dataset of over 100,000 human-generated question-answer pairs. Crowdworkers supply questions and answers based on a set of over 10,000 news articles from CNN, with answers consisting of spans of text in the articles. We collect this dataset through a four-stage process designed to solicit exploratory questions that require reasoning. Analysis confirms that NewsQA demands abilities beyond simple word matching and recognizing textual entailment. We measure human performance on the dataset and compare it to several strong neural models. The performance gap between humans and machines (13.3% F1) indicates that significant progress can be made on NewsQA through future research. The dataset is freely available online.
Anthology ID:
W17-2623
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Representation Learning for NLP
Month:
August
Year:
2017
Address:
Vancouver, Canada
Editors:
Phil Blunsom, Antoine Bordes, Kyunghyun Cho, Shay Cohen, Chris Dyer, Edward Grefenstette, Karl Moritz Hermann, Laura Rimell, Jason Weston, Scott Yih
Venue:
RepL4NLP
SIG:
SIGREP
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
191–200
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W17-2623
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W17-2623
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Adam Trischler, Tong Wang, Xingdi Yuan, Justin Harris, Alessandro Sordoni, Philip Bachman, and Kaheer Suleman. 2017. NewsQA: A Machine Comprehension Dataset. In Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Representation Learning for NLP, pages 191–200, Vancouver, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
NewsQA: A Machine Comprehension Dataset (Trischler et al., RepL4NLP 2017)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W17-2623.pdf
Code
 additional community code
Data
NewsQABookTestCBTMCTestSQuAD