Papers › ExpMRC: Explainability Evaluation for Machine Reading Comprehension

ExpMRC: Explainability Evaluation for Machine Reading Comprehension

10 May 2021arXiv:2105.04126archive 2025-07-28

Yiming Cui, Ting Liu, Wanxiang Che, Zhigang Chen, Shijin Wang

Achieving human-level performance on some of Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) datasets is no longer challenging with the help of powerful Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs). However, it is necessary to provide both answer prediction and its explanation to further improve the MRC system's reliability, especially for real-life applications. In this paper, we propose a new benchmark called ExpMRC for evaluating the explainability of the MRC systems. ExpMRC contains four subsets, including SQuAD, CMRC 2018, RACE^+, and C³ with additional annotations of the answer's evidence. The MRC systems are required to give not only the correct answer but also its explanation. We use state-of-the-art pre-trained language models to build baseline systems and adopt various unsupervised approaches to extract evidence without a human-annotated training set. The experimental results show that these models are still far from human performance, suggesting that the ExpMRC is challenging. Resources will be available through https://github.com/ymcui/expmrc

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Machine Reading ComprehensionMulti-Choice MRCQuestion AnsweringReading ComprehensionSpan-Extraction MRC

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ExpMRC

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