Scientific Machine Reading Comprehension (SMRC) aims to facilitate the understanding of scientific texts through human-machine interactions. While existing dataset has significantly contributed to this field, it predominantly focus on single-perspective question-answer pairs, thereby overlooking the inherent variation in comprehension levels among different readers. To address this limitation, we introduce a novel multi-perspective scientific machine reading comprehension dataset, SciMRC, which incorporates perspectives from beginners, students, and experts. Our dataset comprises 741 scientific papers and 6,057 question-answer pairs, with 3,306, 1,800, and 951 pairs corresponding to beginners, students, and experts respectively. Extensive experiments conducted on SciMRC using pre-trained models underscore the importance of considering diverse perspectives in SMRC and highlight the challenging nature of our scientific machine comprehension tasks.

Open-retrieval conversational machine reading comprehension (OCMRC) simulates reallife conversational interaction scenes.Machines are required to make a decision of Yes/No/Inquire or generate a follow-up question when the decision is Inquire based on retrieved rule texts, user scenario, user question and dialogue history.Recent studies try to reduce the information gap between decision-making and question generation, in order to improve the performance of generation.However, the information gap still persists because these methods are still limited in pipeline framework, where decision-making and question generation are performed separately, making it hard to share the entailment reasoning used in decision-making across all stages.To tackle the above problem, we propose a novel one-stage end-to-end framework, called Entailment Fused-T5 (EFT), to bridge the information gap between decisionmaking and question generation in a global understanding manner.The extensive experimental results demonstrate that our proposed framework achieves new state-of-the-art performance on the OR-ShARC benchmark.Our model and code are publicly available 1 .

Heqi Zheng, Xiao Zhang, Zewen Chi, Heyan Huang, Yan Tan, Tian Lan, Wei Wei, Xian-Ling Mao. Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2022.

Conversational machine reading comprehension (CMRC) aims to assist computers to understand an natural language text and thereafter engage in a multi-turn conversation to answer questions related to the text. Existing methods typically require three steps: (1) decision making based on entailment reasoning; (2) span extraction if required by the above decision; (3) question rephrasing based on the extracted span. However, for nearly all these methods, the span extraction and question rephrasing steps cannot fully exploit the fine-grained entailment reasoning information in decision making step because of their relative independence, which will further enlarge the information gap between decision making and question phrasing. Thus, to tackle this problem, we propose a novel end-to-end framework for conversational machine reading comprehension based on shared parameter mechanism, called entailment reasoning T5 (ET5). Despite the lightweight of our proposed framework, experimental results show that the proposed ET5 achieves new state-of-the-art results on the ShARC leaderboard with the BLEU-4 score of 55.2. Our model and code are publicly available.