# MaP: A Matrix-based Prediction Approach to Improve Span Extraction in Machine Reading Comprehension

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.14348 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.14348/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 29 Sep 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Deep Understanding based Multi-Document Machine Reading Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03494/) (2022)
- [An Understanding-Oriented Robust Machine Reading Comprehension Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.00187/) (2022)
- [Clinical Reading Comprehension with Encoder-Decoder Models Enhanced by Direct Preference Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.14000/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Span extraction is an essential problem in machine reading comprehension. Most of the existing algorithms predict the start and end positions of an answer span in the given corresponding context by generating two probability vectors. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that extends the probability vector to a probability matrix. Such a matrix can cover more start-end position pairs. Precisely, to each possible start index, the method always generates an end probability vector. Besides, we propose a sampling-based training strategy to address the computational cost and memory issue in the matrix training phase. We evaluate our method on SQuAD 1.1 and three other question answering benchmarks. Leveraging the most competitive models BERT and BiDAF as the backbone, our proposed approach can get consistent improvements in all datasets, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed method.