I Know There Is No Answer: Modeling Answer Validation for Machine Reading Comprehension

Abstract

Existing works on machine reading comprehension mostly focus on extracting text spans from passages with the assumption that the passage must contain the answer to the question. This assumption usually cannot be satisfied in real-life applications. In this paper, we study the reading comprehension task in which whether the given passage contains the answer is not specified in advance. The system needs to correctly refuse to give an answer when a passage does not contain the answer. We develop several baselines including the answer extraction based method and the passage triggering based method to address this task. Furthermore, we propose an answer validation model that first extracts the answer and then validates whether it is correct. To evaluate these methods, we build a dataset SQuAD-T based on the SQuAD dataset, which consists of questions in the SQuAD dataset and includes relevant passages that may not contain the answer. We report results on this dataset and provides comparisons and analysis of the different models.