# Simple and Effective Multi-Paragraph Reading Comprehension

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.10723 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10723/

## Key facts

- Cited by 120 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 29 Oct 2017.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 120)

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- [Retrieving and Reading: A Comprehensive Survey on Open-domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00774/) (2021)
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## Abstract (arXiv)

We consider the problem of adapting neural paragraph-level question answering models to the case where entire documents are given as input. Our proposed solution trains models to produce well calibrated confidence scores for their results on individual paragraphs. We sample multiple paragraphs from the documents during training, and use a shared-normalization training objective that encourages the model to produce globally correct output. We combine this method with a state-of-the-art pipeline for training models on document QA data. Experiments demonstrate strong performance on several document QA datasets. Overall, we are able to achieve a score of 71.3 F1 on the web portion of TriviaQA, a large improvement from the 56.7 F1 of the previous best system.
