# Zero-Shot Complex Question-Answering on Long Scientific Documents

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.02695 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.02695/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 4 Mar 2025.

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Before Forgetting, Learn to Remember: Revisiting Foundational Learning Failures in LVLM Unlearning Benchmarks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.03759/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

With the rapid development in Transformer-based language models, the reading comprehension tasks on short documents and simple questions have been largely addressed. Long documents, specifically the scientific documents that are densely packed with knowledge discovered and developed by humans, remain relatively unexplored. These documents often come with a set of complex and more realistic questions, adding to their complexity. We present a zero-shot pipeline framework that enables social science researchers to perform question-answering tasks that are complex yet of predetermined question formats on full-length research papers without requiring machine learning expertise. Our approach integrates pre-trained language models to handle challenging scenarios including multi-span extraction, multi-hop reasoning, and long-answer generation. Evaluating on MLPsych, a novel dataset of social psychology papers with annotated complex questions, we demonstrate that our framework achieves strong performance through combination of extractive and generative models. This work advances document understanding capabilities for social sciences while providing practical tools for researchers.