Cited by 614Topic ModelingMultimodal Machine Learning ApplicationsNatural Language Processing Techniques

The NarrativeQA Reading Comprehension Challenge

Open access
Kočiský, Tomáš, Schwarz, Jonathan, Blunsom, Phil, Dyer, Chris, Hermann, Karl Moritz, Melis, Gábor, Grefenstette, Edward·2018·Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Abstract

Reading comprehension (RC)—in contrast to information retrieval—requires integrating information and reasoning about events, entities, and their relations across a full document. Question answering is conventionally used to assess RC ability, in both artificial agents and children learning to read. However, existing RC datasets and tasks are dominated by questions that can be solved by selecting answers using superficial information (e.g., local context similarity or global term frequency); they thus fail to test for the essential integrative aspect of RC. To encourage progress on deeper comprehension of language, we present a new dataset and set of tasks in which the reader must answer questions about stories by reading entire books or movie scripts. These tasks are designed so that successfully answering their questions requires understanding the underlying narrative rather than relying on shallow pattern matching or salience. We show that although humans solve the tasks easily, standard RC models struggle on the tasks presented here. We provide an analysis of the dataset and the challenges it presents.

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Crossref · 10.1162/tacl_a_00023

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33 of 33 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

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  • NarrativeQA tests deep comprehension and synthesis of full-length literary texts and movie scripts.

    “NarrativeQA tests deep comprehension and synthesis of full-length literary texts and movie scripts.[2]”
  • Narrative comprehension requires preserving global document structure (character arcs, temporal sequences, thematic callbacks) that chunk-level retrieval systematically destroys.

    “because narrative comprehension requires preserving global document structure , character arcs, temporal sequences, thematic callbacks , that chunk-level retrieval systematically destroys.[2]”
  • The types of questions generated range from typical short answer span questions to multiple spans for text question generation.

    “The type of questions to be generated range from the typical short answer span questions to multiple spans for question generation from the text [42, 47, 106, 107, 112].”

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Authors
Kočiský, T., Schwarz, J., Blunsom, P., Dyer, C., Hermann, K. M., Melis, G., & Grefenstette, E.
Affiliations
  • University of Oxford (GB)
  • Google DeepMind (United Kingdom) (GB)
Venue
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Publisher
MIT Press
Published
2018-12
Volume
6
Pages
317-328
ISSN
2307-387X (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W2779681640
Cited by
596
References
31
Citations by year
2026: 51 · 2025: 65 · 2024: 40 · 2023: 77 · 2022: 71 · 2021: 87 · 2020: 80 · 2019: 91 · 2018: 32 · 2017: 1 · 2016: 1
FWCI
40.86
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Licence
cc-by
Locations
  • Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
  • DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University)
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Topic Modeling
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Multimodal Machine Learning Applications
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Natural Language Processing Techniques
Keywords
reading comprehension, narrative comprehension, question answering, screenplays, deep comprehension

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