Papers › Looking Beyond the Surface: A Challenge Set for Reading Comprehension over Multiple Sentences

Looking Beyond the Surface: A Challenge Set for Reading Comprehension over Multiple Sentences

1 Jun 2018NAACL 2018 6archive 2025-07-28

Daniel Khashabi, Snigdha Chaturvedi, Michael Roth, Shyam Upadhyay, Dan Roth

We present a reading comprehension challenge in which questions can only be answered by taking into account information from multiple sentences. We solicit and verify questions and answers for this challenge through a 4-step crowdsourcing experiment. Our challenge dataset contains 6,500+ questions for 1000+ paragraphs across 7 different domains (elementary school science, news, travel guides, fiction stories, etc) bringing in linguistic diversity to the texts and to the questions wordings. On a subset of our dataset, we found human solvers to achieve an F1-score of 88.1{\%}. We analyze a range of baselines, including a recent state-of-art reading comprehension system, and demonstrate the difficulty of this challenge, despite a high human performance. The dataset is the first to study multi-sentence inference at scale, with an open-ended set of question types that requires reasoning skills.

PaperPDF

Code

No code repository is listed for this paper in the archive or in Syntology's graph.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

DiversityNatural Language InferenceQuestion AnsweringReading ComprehensionSentence

Datasets

Introduced by this paper, per the archive.

MultiRC

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections