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Question Answering is a Format; When is it Useful?

arXiv 1909.11291 ↗First posted 25 Sep 2019cs.CLcited by 25

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Abstract (arXiv)

Recent years have seen a dramatic expansion of tasks and datasets posed as question answering, from reading comprehension, semantic role labeling, and even machine translation, to image and video understanding. With this expansion, there are many differing views on the utility and definition of "question answering" itself. Some argue that its scope should be narrow, or broad, or that it is overused in datasets today. In this opinion piece, we argue that question answering should be considered a format which is sometimes useful for studying particular phenomena, not a phenomenon or task in itself. We discuss when a task is correctly described as question answering, and when a task is usefully posed as question answering, instead of using some other format.

Key facts. Cited by 25 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). First posted on arXiv 25 Sep 2019.

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Citing papers per year: 2021: 9; 2022: 4; 2023: 5; 2024: 3; 2025: 2; 2026: 2.

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  1. 2021QA Dataset Explosion: A Taxonomy of NLP Resources for Question Answering and Reading Comprehensioncited by 91
  2. 2021Few-Shot Self-Rationalization with Natural Language Promptscited by 83
  3. 2021SpartQA: : A Textual Question Answering Benchmark for Spatial Reasoningcited by 75
  4. 2022CONDAQA: A Contrastive Reading Comprehension Dataset for Reasoning about Negationcited by 38
  5. 2021FaVIQ: FAct Verification from Information-seeking Questionscited by 36
  6. 2023It Takes Two to Tango: Navigating Conceptualizations of NLP Tasks and Measurements of Performancecited by 25
  7. 2021Question Answering Infused Pre-training of General-Purpose Contextualized Representationscited by 19
  8. 2023Make Every Example Count: On the Stability and Utility of Self-Influence for Learning from Noisy NLP Datasetscited by 18
  9. 2021Complex Factoid Question Answering with a Free-Text Knowledge Graphcited by 14
  10. 2021Dependency Parsing as MRC-based Span-Span Predictioncited by 13
  11. 2021Hey AI, Can You Solve Complex Tasks by Talking to Agents?cited by 13
  12. 2022Calibrating Trust of Multi-Hop Question Answering Systems with Decompositional Probescited by 9
13 more
  1. 2025ProMQA-Assembly: Multimodal Procedural QA Dataset on Assemblycited by 5
  2. 2022PInKS: Preconditioned Commonsense Inference with Minimal Supervisioncited by 4
  3. 2023RadLing: Towards Efficient Radiology Report Understandingcited by 4
  4. 2024Promptly Predicting Structures: The Return of Inferencecited by 4
  5. 2023Improving Information Extraction on Business Documents with Specific Pre-Training Taskscited by 3
  6. 2022On Event Individuation for Document-Level Information Extractioncited by 2
  7. 2023The Case for Scalable, Data-Driven Theory: A Paradigm for Scientific Progress in NLPcited by 2
  8. 2024Assessing biomedical knowledge robustness in large language models by query-efficient sampling attackscited by 1
  9. 2024A Systematic Survey of Natural Language Processing for the Greek Languagecited by 1
  10. 2025Mapping the Course for Prompt-based Structured Predictioncited by 1
  11. 2021Is Sluice Resolution really just Question Answering?cited by 0
  12. 2026HealthLoopQA: A Context-Aware Question Answering Benchmark for Interpreting Wearable Monitoring Data in Diabetes Carecited by 0
  13. 2026Emergent Unfaithfulness: How Alignment Training Causes Language Models to Silently Override Task Faithfulnesscited by 0