# Answer Span Correction in Machine Reading Comprehension

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.03435 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.03435/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 6 Nov 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [SmartBook: AI-Assisted Situation Report Generation for Intelligence Analysts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14337/) (2023)
- [Correct after Answer: Enhancing Multi-Span Question Answering with Post-Processing Method](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.16788/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Answer validation in machine reading comprehension (MRC) consists of verifying an extracted answer against an input context and question pair. Previous work has looked at re-assessing the "answerability" of the question given the extracted answer. Here we address a different problem: the tendency of existing MRC systems to produce partially correct answers when presented with answerable questions. We explore the nature of such errors and propose a post-processing correction method that yields statistically significant performance improvements over state-of-the-art MRC systems in both monolingual and multilingual evaluation.