TORQUE: A Reading Comprehension Dataset of Temporal Ordering Questions

Qiang Ning, Hao Wu, Rujun Han, Nanyun Peng, Matt Gardner, Dan Roth


Abstract
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.
Anthology ID:
2020.emnlp-main.88
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Bonnie Webber, Trevor Cohn, Yulan He, Yang Liu
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1158–1172
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.88
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.88
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Qiang Ning, Hao Wu, Rujun Han, Nanyun Peng, Matt Gardner, and Dan Roth. 2020. TORQUE: A Reading Comprehension Dataset of Temporal Ordering Questions. In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), pages 1158–1172, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
TORQUE: A Reading Comprehension Dataset of Temporal Ordering Questions (Ning et al., EMNLP 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.88.pdf
Video:
 https://slideslive.com/38938807
Data
TorqueSQuAD