# Know What You Don't Know: Unanswerable Questions for SQuAD

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.03822 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.03822/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1,554 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 11 Jun 2018.

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## Abstract (arXiv)

Extractive reading comprehension systems can often locate the correct answer to a question in a context document, but they also tend to make unreliable guesses on questions for which the correct answer is not stated in the context. Existing datasets either focus exclusively on answerable questions, or use automatically generated unanswerable questions that are easy to identify. To address these weaknesses, we present SQuAD 2.0, the latest version of the Stanford Question Answering Dataset (SQuAD). SQuAD 2.0 combines existing SQuAD data with over 50,000 unanswerable questions written adversarially by crowdworkers to look similar to answerable ones. To do well on SQuAD 2.0, systems must not only answer questions when possible, but also determine when no answer is supported by the paragraph and abstain from answering. SQuAD 2.0 is a challenging natural language understanding task for existing models: a strong neural system that gets 86% F1 on SQuAD 1.1 achieves only 66% F1 on SQuAD 2.0.