Cited by 1,690Topic ModelingNatural Language Processing TechniquesInformation Retrieval and Search Behavior

TriviaQA: A Large Scale Distantly Supervised Challenge Dataset for Reading Comprehension

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Joshi, Mandar, Choi, Eunsol, Weld, Daniel, Zettlemoyer, Luke·2017·Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Abstract

We present TriviaQA, a challenging reading comprehension dataset containing over 650K question-answer-evidence triples.TriviaQA includes 95K questionanswer pairs authored by trivia enthusiasts and independently gathered evidence documents, six per question on average, that provide high quality distant supervision for answering the questions.We show that, in comparison to other recently introduced large-scale datasets, TriviaQA (1) has relatively complex, compositional questions, (2) has considerable syntactic and lexical variability between questions and corresponding answer-evidence sentences, and (3) requires more cross sentence reasoning to find answers.We also present two baseline algorithms: a featurebased classifier and a state-of-the-art neural network, that performs well on SQuAD reading comprehension.Neither approach comes close to human performance (23% and 40% vs. 80%), suggesting that Trivi-aQA is a challenging testbed that is worth significant future study. 1

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  • Past benchmarks for information retrieval mostly focus on easily found information and have become saturated by recent language models.

    “While past benchmarks have measured the ability to retrieve information (Joshi et al., 2017;Yang et al., 2018;Thorne et al., 2018;Dinan et al., 2019;Fan et al., 2019;Mialon et al., 2023), most of these benchmarks focus on retrieving information that can be found easily, and hence have become saturated by recent language models.”

    From BrowseComp: A Simple Yet Challenging Benchmark for Browsing Agents (2025) · cites this paper as Joshi et al., 2017

    Section 7.2 identifies TriviaQA as a benchmark with examples usable for information retrieval, and the Introduction says earlier reading-comprehension datasets often reached near-human performance quickly. But the paper does not establish that most retrieval benchmarks concern easily found information or have been saturated by recent language models. Section 6.3 says TriviaQA itself was not solved by information retrieval and its tested models lagged far behind humans. (LLM, conf=0.83)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured
  • Traditional benchmarks such as NaturalQuestions and TriviaQA primarily feature single-hop questions, which typically do not require multi-step reasoning or iterative retrieval.

    “However, these benchmarks primarily feature single-hop questions, which typically do not require multi-step reasoning or iterative retrieval.”

    From BrowseComp-Plus: A Fair and Disentangled Evaluation Benchmark for Deep Search Agents (2026) · cites this paper as Joshi et al., 2017

    The Dataset Analysis (§4; page not supplied) finds that 40% of sampled TriviaQA question–evidence pairs required information scattered across multiple sentences, consistent with a majority not requiring that kind of reasoning. But the paper does not classify TriviaQA questions as single-hop or assess iterative retrieval, and it does not address NaturalQuestions. A single-sentence question (§7.2) is not necessarily a single-hop question. (LLM, conf=0.82)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured
  • On TriviaQA, Chinchilla substantially outperforms Gopher in both filtered and unfiltered sets.

    “On TriviaQA (Joshi et al., 2017) we show results for both the filtered (previously used in retrieval and open-book work) and unfiltered set (previously used in large language model evaluations). In both cases, Chinchilla substantially out performs Gopher .”

    From Training Compute-Optimal Large Language Models (2022) · cites this paper as Joshi et al., 2017

  • Imitative falsehoods are less likely to be covered by existing question-answering benchmarks.

    “One reason to focus on imitative falsehoods is that they are less likely to be covered by existing question-answering benchmarks (Clark et al., 2018; Kwiatkowski et al., 2019; Joshi et al., 2017; Hendrycks et al., 2020).”

    From TruthfulQA: Measuring How Models Mimic Human Falsehoods (2022) · cites this paper as Joshi et al., 2017

    The Introduction compares TriviaQA with existing question-answering datasets, and §6.4 discusses errors such as paraphrasing and distractor entities. Neither addresses whether imitative falsehoods are less likely to be covered by those benchmarks; searches for that phrase and for false beliefs or misleading answers found no relevant passage. The supplied copy gives no page numbers. (LLM, conf=0.74)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured
  • LLMs perform better on nearly all closed-book QA datasets, such as NaturalQuestions, WebQuestions, and TriviaQA.

    “LLMs perform better on nearly all datasets, such as on NaturalQuestions [62], WebQuestions [10], and TriviaQA [56].”

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Cites

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Research works printed but not linked: 7

  1. Jordan Boyd-Graber, Brianna Satinoff, He He, and Hal Daumé III. 2012. Besting the quiz master: Crowdsourcing incremental classification games. In Proceedings of the 2012 Joint Con- ference on Empirical Methods in Natural Lan- guage Processing and Computational Natural Lan- guage Learning. Association for Computational Linguistics, Jeju Island, Korea, pages 1290-1301. http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/D12-1118.
  2. Danqi Chen, Jason Bolton, and Christopher D. Man- ning. 2016. A thorough examination of the cnn/daily mail reading comprehension task. In Pro- ceedings of the 54th Annual Meeting of the As- sociation for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). Association for Computational Linguistics, Berlin, Germany, pages 2358-2367. http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P16-1223.
  3. Takeshi Onishi, Hai Wang, Mohit Bansal, Kevin Gim- pel, and David McAllester. 2016. Who did what: A large-scale person-centered cloze dataset. In Pro- ceedings of the 2016 Conference on Empirical Meth- ods in Natural Language Processing. Association for Computational Linguistics, Austin, Texas, pages 2230-2235. https://aclweb.org/anthology/D16- 1241.
  4. Denis Paperno, Germán Kruszewski, Angeliki Lazari- dou, Ngoc Quan Pham, Raffaella Bernardi, San- dro Pezzelle, Marco Baroni, Gemma Boleda, and Raquel Fernandez. 2016. The lambada dataset: Word prediction requiring a broad discourse con- text. In Proceedings of the 54th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Vol- ume 1: Long Papers). Association for Computa- tional Linguistics, Berlin, Germany, pages 1525- 1534. http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P16-1144.
  5. Panupong Pasupat and Percy Liang. 2015. Com- positional semantic parsing on semi-structured ta- bles. In Proceedings of the 53rd Annual Meet- ing of the Association for Computational Lin- guistics and the 7th International Joint Confer- ence on Natural Language Processing of the Asian Federation of Natural Language Process- ing, ACL 2015, July 26-31, 2015, Beijing, China, Volume 1: Long Papers. pages 1470-1480. http://aclweb.org/anthology/P/P15/P15-1142.pdf.
  6. Hai Wang, Mohit Bansal, Kevin Gimpel, and David McAllester. 2015. Machine comprehension with syntax, frames, and semantics. In Proceedings of the 53rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Compu- tational Linguistics and the 7th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Vol- ume 2: Short Papers). Association for Computa- tional Linguistics, Beijing, China, pages 700-706. http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P15-2115.
  7. Zichao Yang, Diyi Yang, Chris Dyer, Xiaodong He, Alex Smola, and Eduard Hovy. 2016. Hierar- chical attention networks for document classifica- tion. In Proceedings of the 2016 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies. Association for Computational Lin- guistics, San Diego, California, pages 1480-1489. http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/N16-1174.

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Authors
Joshi, M., Choi, E., Weld, D., & Zettlemoyer, L.
Affiliations
  • University of Washington (US)
  • Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (US)
Venue
Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Published
2017
Pages
1601-1611
ISSN
0736-587X (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W2612431505
Cited by
1,690
References
21
Citations by year
2026: 141 · 2025: 205 · 2024: 157 · 2023: 220 · 2022: 204 · 2021: 259 · 2020: 198 · 2019: 190 · 2018: 97 · 2017: 19
FWCI
61.63
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
Licence
cc-by
Locations
  • Proceedings of the conference - Association for Computational Linguistics. Meeting (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University)
  • IEEE DataPort (cc-by)
Funders
  • Tencent
  • Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (FA8750-13-2-0019, FA8750)
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Topic Modeling
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Natural Language Processing Techniques
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Information Retrieval and Search Behavior
Keywords
TriviaQA, reading comprehension, distant supervision, trivia questions, SQuAD

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