Papers › TORQUE: A Reading Comprehension Dataset of Temporal Ordering Questions
TORQUE: A Reading Comprehension Dataset of Temporal Ordering Questions
Qiang Ning, Hao Wu, Rujun Han, Nanyun Peng, Matt Gardner, Dan Roth
A critical part of reading is being able to understand the temporal relationships between events described in a passage of text, even when those relationships are not explicitly stated. However, current machine reading comprehension benchmarks have practically no questions that test temporal phenomena, so systems trained on these benchmarks have no capacity to answer questions such as "what happened before/after [some event]?" We introduce TORQUE, a new English reading comprehension benchmark built on 3.2k news snippets with 21k human-generated questions querying temporal relationships. Results show that RoBERTa-large achieves an exact-match score of 51% on the test set of TORQUE, about 30% behind human performance.
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Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
| Task | Dataset | Model | Metric | Value | Rank at snapshot | Leaderboard | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Question Answering | Torque | RoBERTa-large | C | 34.5 | #2 of 2 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Question Answering | Torque | RoBERTa-large | EM | 51.1 | #2 of 2 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Question Answering | Torque | RoBERTa-large | F1 | 75.2 | #2 of 2 | Archive leaderboard | report |
Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.
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