Narrative Why-Question Answering: A Review of Challenges and Datasets

Abstract

Narrative Why-Question Answering is an important task to assess the causal reasoning ability of models in narrative settings. Further progress in this domain requires clear identification of challenges that question answering models need to address. Since Narrative Why-Question Answering combines the characteristics of both narrative understanding and why-question answering, we review the challenges related to these two domains. In the context of why-questions, we review the characteristics of causal relations and the sources of ambiguity in why-questions. In relation to narratives, we discuss the challenges posed by the implicitness and the length of the narrative texts. Furthermore, we identify suitable datasets for Narrative Why-Question Answering and outline both data-specific and task-specific challenges that can be utilized to test the performance of models. Additionally, we discuss some issues that can pose problems in benchmarking Narrative Why-Question Answering systems.