mlsanityData to 13 Oct 2026

Narrative Question Answering with Cutting-Edge Open-Domain QA Techniques: A Comprehensive Study

arXiv 2106.03826 ↗First posted 7 Jun 2021cs.CL cs.AIcited by 15

Not on the map. Why?

Abstract (arXiv)

Recent advancements in open-domain question answering (ODQA), i.e., finding answers from large open-domain corpus like Wikipedia, have led to human-level performance on many datasets. However, progress in QA over book stories (Book QA) lags behind despite its similar task formulation to ODQA. This work provides a comprehensive and quantitative analysis about the difficulty of Book QA: (1) We benchmark the research on the NarrativeQA dataset with extensive experiments with cutting-edge ODQA techniques. This quantifies the challenges Book QA poses, as well as advances the published state-of-the-art with a ~7% absolute improvement on Rouge-L. (2) We further analyze the detailed challenges in Book QA through human studies.footnoteurlhttps://github.com/gorov/BookQA. Our findings indicate that the event-centric questions dominate this task, which exemplifies the inability of existing QA models to handle event-oriented scenarios.

Key facts. Cited by 15 papers in the map (data through 13 Oct 2026). Builds on 28 of its 42 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 7 Jun 2021.

Builds on

28 of 42 references.

References · 28

  1. 2018BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understandingcited by 40,304
  2. 2019Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformercited by 14,549
  3. 2019BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehensioncited by 5,884
  4. 2020Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answeringcited by 3,797
  5. 2018HotpotQA: A Dataset for Diverse, Explainable Multi-hop Question Answeringcited by 3,716
  6. 2018Deep contextualized word representationscited by 2,286
  7. 2020REALM: Retrieval-Augmented Language Model Pre-Trainingcited by 2,131
  8. 2018Know What You Don't Know: Unanswerable Questions for SQuADcited by 1,546
  9. 2020Leveraging Passage Retrieval with Generative Models for Open Domain Question Answeringcited by 1,206
  10. 2017Reading Wikipedia to Answer Open-Domain Questionscited by 777
  11. 2019Latent Retrieval for Weakly Supervised Open Domain Question Answeringcited by 693
  12. 2017The NarrativeQA Reading Comprehension Challengecited by 592
16 more
  1. 2017SearchQA: A New Q&A Dataset Augmented with Context from a Search Enginecited by 222
  2. 2019Show Your Work: Improved Reporting of Experimental Resultscited by 166
  3. 2019Pretrained Encyclopedia: Weakly Supervised Knowledge-Pretrained Language Modelcited by 102
  4. 2019A Discrete Hard EM Approach for Weakly Supervised Question Answeringcited by 78
  5. 2017Relevance of Unsupervised Metrics in Task-Oriented Dialogue for Evaluating Natural Language Generationcited by 61
  6. 2019Simple and Effective Curriculum Pointer-Generator Networks for Reading Comprehension over Long Narrativescited by 59
  7. 2019TWEETQA: A Social Media Focused Question Answering Datasetcited by 55
  8. 2017Quasar: Datasets for Question Answering by Search and Readingcited by 50
  9. 2017Evidence Aggregation for Answer Re-Ranking in Open-Domain Question Answeringcited by 24
  10. 2018Improving Machine Reading Comprehension with General Reading Strategiescited by 20
  11. 2020Probabilistic Assumptions Matter: Improved Models for Distantly-Supervised Document-Level Question Answeringcited by 17
  12. 2019Multi-style Generative Reading Comprehensioncited by 14
  13. 2021ReadTwice: Reading Very Large Documents with Memoriescited by 14
  14. 2020RECONSIDER: Re-Ranking using Span-Focused Cross-Attention for Open Domain Question Answeringcited by 9
  15. 2020Frustratingly Hard Evidence Retrieval for QA Over Bookscited by 7
  16. 2021Complementary Evidence Identification in Open-Domain Question Answeringcited by 2

Built on by

Cited by year

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

15 papers.

Sort:

By area:

  1. 2022Fantastic Questions and Where to Find Them: FairytaleQA -- An Authentic Dataset for Narrative Comprehensioncited by 80
  2. 2023Search-in-the-Chain: Interactively Enhancing Large Language Models with Search for Knowledge-intensive Taskscited by 73
  3. 2021ConditionalQA: A Complex Reading Comprehension Dataset with Conditional Answerscited by 29
  4. 2021It is AI's Turn to Ask Humans a Question: Question-Answer Pair Generation for Children's Story Bookscited by 23
  5. 2023Personality Understanding of Fictional Characters during Book Readingcited by 20
  6. 2022TVShowGuess: Character Comprehension in Stories as Speaker Guessingcited by 17
  7. 2023Are Human Explanations Always Helpful? Towards Objective Evaluation of Human Natural Language Explanationscited by 13
  8. 2022A Survey of Machine Narrative Reading Comprehension Assessmentscited by 10
  9. 2025SitEmb-v1.5: Improved Context-Aware Dense Retrieval for Semantic Association and Long Story Comprehensioncited by 8
  10. 2023MultiVENT: Multilingual Videos of Events with Aligned Natural Textcited by 7
  11. 2025LiteraryQA: Towards Effective Evaluation of Long-document Narrative QAcited by 6
  12. 2024TIGQA:An Expert Annotated Question Answering Dataset in Tigrinyacited by 5
3 more
  1. 2023Plot Retrieval as an Assessment of Abstract Semantic Associationcited by 3
  2. 2024Equipping Transformer with Random-Access Reading for Long-Context Understandingcited by 1
  3. 2024DragonVerseQA: Open-Domain Long-Form Context-Aware Question-Answeringcited by 0