mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

English Machine Reading Comprehension Datasets: A Survey

arXiv 2101.10421 ↗First posted 25 Jan 2021cs.CLcited by 26

Not on the map. Why?

Abstract (arXiv)

This paper surveys 60 English Machine Reading Comprehension datasets, with a view to providing a convenient resource for other researchers interested in this problem. We categorize the datasets according to their question and answer form and compare them across various dimensions including size, vocabulary, data source, method of creation, human performance level, and first question word. Our analysis reveals that Wikipedia is by far the most common data source and that there is a relative lack of why, when, and where questions across datasets.

Key facts. Cited by 26 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 84 of its 141 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 25 Jan 2021.

Builds on

84 of 141 references.

References · 84

  1. 2018BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understandingcited by 40,204
  2. 2018Think you have Solved Question Answering? Try ARC, the AI2 Reasoning Challengecited by 4,710
  3. 2016SQuAD: 100,000+ Questions for Machine Comprehension of Textcited by 4,115
  4. 2019HellaSwag: Can a Machine Really Finish Your Sentence?cited by 4,018
  5. 2018HotpotQA: A Dataset for Diverse, Explainable Multi-hop Question Answeringcited by 3,686
  6. 2017TriviaQA: A Large Scale Distantly Supervised Challenge Dataset for Reading Comprehensioncited by 2,895
  7. 2019BoolQ: Exploring the Surprising Difficulty of Natural Yes/No Questionscited by 2,140
  8. 2018Can a Suit of Armor Conduct Electricity? A New Dataset for Open Book Question Answeringcited by 2,114
  9. 2019Language Models as Knowledge Bases?cited by 1,922
  10. 2018CommonsenseQA: A Question Answering Challenge Targeting Commonsense Knowledgecited by 1,793
  11. 2016MS MARCO: A Human Generated MAchine Reading COmprehension Datasetcited by 1,591
  12. 2018Know What You Don't Know: Unanswerable Questions for SQuADcited by 1,538
38 more
  1. 2019PubMedQA: A Dataset for Biomedical Research Question Answeringcited by 1,271
  2. 2015Aligning Books and Movies: Towards Story-like Visual Explanations by Watching Movies and Reading Bookscited by 1,041
  3. 2015Teaching Machines to Read and Comprehendcited by 1,039
  4. 2016The LAMBADA dataset: Word prediction requiring a broad discourse contextcited by 960
  5. 2019DROP: A Reading Comprehension Benchmark Requiring Discrete Reasoning Over Paragraphscited by 883
  6. 2017RACE: Large-scale ReAding Comprehension Dataset From Examinationscited by 851
  7. 2017Crowdsourcing Multiple Choice Science Questionscited by 742
  8. 2018CoQA: A Conversational Question Answering Challengecited by 674
  9. 2017The NarrativeQA Reading Comprehension Challengecited by 590
  10. 2016Ups and Downs: Modeling the Visual Evolution of Fashion Trends with One-Class Collaborative Filteringcited by 517
  11. 2020TyDi QA: A Benchmark for Information-Seeking Question Answering in Typologically Diverse Languagescited by 486
  12. 2016A Corpus and Evaluation Framework for Deeper Understanding of Commonsense Storiescited by 413
  13. 2018QuAC : Question Answering in Contextcited by 379
  14. 2019MLQA: Evaluating Cross-lingual Extractive Question Answeringcited by 339
  15. 2018SWAG: A Large-Scale Adversarial Dataset for Grounded Commonsense Inferencecited by 333
  16. 2016NewsQA: A Machine Comprehension Datasetcited by 330
  17. 2015Towards AI-Complete Question Answering: A Set of Prerequisite Toy Taskscited by 309
  18. 2015MovieQA: Understanding Stories in Movies through Question-Answeringcited by 304
  19. 2019Cosmos QA: Machine Reading Comprehension with Contextual Commonsense Reasoningcited by 281
  20. 2020CLUE: A Chinese Language Understanding Evaluation Benchmarkcited by 277
  21. 2019QASC: A Dataset for Question Answering via Sentence Compositioncited by 248
  22. 2016Key-Value Memory Networks for Directly Reading Documentscited by 223
  23. 2017SearchQA: A New Q&A Dataset Augmented with Context from a Search Enginecited by 221
  24. 2020ReClor: A Reading Comprehension Dataset Requiring Logical Reasoningcited by 211
  25. 2018ReCoRD: Bridging the Gap between Human and Machine Commonsense Reading Comprehensioncited by 198
  26. 2017Constructing Datasets for Multi-hop Reading Comprehension Across Documentscited by 190
  27. 2019DREAM: A Challenge Dataset and Models for Dialogue-Based Reading Comprehensioncited by 156
  28. 2020MKQA: A Linguistically Diverse Benchmark for Multilingual Open Domain Question Answeringcited by 151
  29. 2018emrQA: A Large Corpus for Question Answering on Electronic Medical Recordscited by 134
  30. 2015Large-scale Simple Question Answering with Memory Networkscited by 127
  31. 2017DuReader: a Chinese Machine Reading Comprehension Dataset from Real-world Applicationscited by 110
  32. 2015The Goldilocks Principle: Reading Children's Books with Explicit Memory Representationscited by 108
  33. 2018RecipeQA: A Challenge Dataset for Multimodal Comprehension of Cooking Recipescited by 74
  34. 2018Interpretation of Natural Language Rules in Conversational Machine Readingcited by 72
  35. 2018DuoRC: Towards Complex Language Understanding with Paraphrased Reading Comprehensioncited by 70
  36. 2018WorldTree: A Corpus of Explanation Graphs for Elementary Science Questions supporting Multi-Hop Inferencecited by 60
  37. 2019TWEETQA: A Social Media Focused Question Answering Datasetcited by 55
  38. 2020RussianSuperGLUE: A Russian Language Understanding Evaluation Benchmarkcited by 53

50 most cited of 84 All 84 (JSON)

Built on by

Cited by year

Citing papers per year: 2021: 8; 2022: 5; 2023: 3; 2024: 9; 2025: 1.

26 papers.

Sort:

  1. 2021QA Dataset Explosion: A Taxonomy of NLP Resources for Question Answering and Reading Comprehensioncited by 91
  2. 2021ArchivalQA: A Large-scale Benchmark Dataset for Open Domain Question Answering over Historical News Collectionscited by 30
  3. 2024Distractor Generation in Multiple-Choice Tasks: A Survey of Methods, Datasets, and Evaluationcited by 25
  4. 2024INDIC QA BENCHMARK: A Multilingual Benchmark to Evaluate Question Answering capability of LLMs for Indic Languagescited by 24
  5. 2022VASR: Visual Analogies of Situation Recognitioncited by 22
  6. 2021Improving Unsupervised Question Answering via Summarization-Informed Question Generationcited by 21
  7. 2021MetaQA: Combining Expert Agents for Multi-Skill Question Answeringcited by 15
  8. 2022A Survey of Intent Classification and Slot-Filling Datasets for Task-Oriented Dialogcited by 14
  9. 2022A Survey of Machine Narrative Reading Comprehension Assessmentscited by 10
  10. 2022Clickbait Spoiling via Question Answering and Passage Retrievalcited by 9
  11. 2021More Than Reading Comprehension: A Survey on Datasets and Metrics of Textual Question Answeringcited by 8
  12. 2024Desiderata for the Context Use of Question Answering Systemscited by 7
14 more
  1. 2021A Survey on non-English Question Answering Datasetcited by 5
  2. 2023ViMMRC 2.0 -- Enhancing Machine Reading Comprehension on Vietnamese Literature Textcited by 5
  3. 2024TIGQA:An Expert Annotated Question Answering Dataset in Tigrinyacited by 5
  4. 2024It Is Not About What You Say, It Is About How You Say It: A Surprisingly Simple Approach for Improving Reading Comprehensioncited by 4
  5. 2024BanglaQuAD: A Bengali Open-domain Question Answering Datasetcited by 4
  6. 2021Generating Answer Candidates for Quizzes and Answer-Aware Question Generatorscited by 3
  7. 2021Literature review on vulnerability detection using NLP technologycited by 2
  8. 2023AmQA: Amharic Question Answering Datasetcited by 1
  9. 2024VlogQA: Task, Dataset, and Baseline Models for Vietnamese Spoken-Based Machine Reading Comprehensioncited by 1
  10. 2024Towards Robust Evaluation: A Comprehensive Taxonomy of Datasets and Metrics for Open Domain Question Answering in the Era of Large Language Modelscited by 1
  11. 2022Collecting high-quality adversarial data for machine reading comprehension tasks with humans and models in the loopcited by 0
  12. 2023Integrating Image Features with Convolutional Sequence-to-sequence Network for Multilingual Visual Question Answeringcited by 0
  13. 2024Recent Advances in Multi-Choice Machine Reading Comprehension: A Survey on Methods and Datasetscited by 0
  14. 2025Investigating Recent Large Language Models for Vietnamese Machine Reading Comprehensioncited by 0