English

Simple and Effective Multi-Paragraph Reading Comprehension

Computation and Language 2017-11-08 v2

Abstract

We consider the problem of adapting neural paragraph-level question answering models to the case where entire documents are given as input. Our proposed solution trains models to produce well calibrated confidence scores for their results on individual paragraphs. We sample multiple paragraphs from the documents during training, and use a shared-normalization training objective that encourages the model to produce globally correct output. We combine this method with a state-of-the-art pipeline for training models on document QA data. Experiments demonstrate strong performance on several document QA datasets. Overall, we are able to achieve a score of 71.3 F1 on the web portion of TriviaQA, a large improvement from the 56.7 F1 of the previous best system.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1710.10723,
  title  = {Simple and Effective Multi-Paragraph Reading Comprehension},
  author = {Christopher Clark and Matt Gardner},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1710.10723},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

11 pages, updated a reference

R2 v1 2026-06-22T22:29:09.468Z