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Main Authors: Piryani, Bhawna, Mozafari, Jamshid, Jatowt, Adam
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.17859
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author Piryani, Bhawna
Mozafari, Jamshid
Jatowt, Adam
author_facet Piryani, Bhawna
Mozafari, Jamshid
Jatowt, Adam
contents Question answering (QA) and Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) tasks have significantly advanced in recent years due to the rapid development of deep learning techniques and, more recently, large language models. At the same time, many benchmark datasets have become available for QA and MRC tasks. However, most existing large-scale benchmark datasets have been created predominantly using synchronous document collections like Wikipedia or the Web. Archival document collections, such as historical newspapers, contain valuable information from the past that is still not widely used to train large language models. To further contribute to advancing QA and MRC tasks and to overcome the limitation of previous datasets, we introduce ChroniclingAmericaQA, a large-scale temporal QA dataset with 487K question-answer pairs created based on the historical newspaper collection Chronicling America. Our dataset is constructed from a subset of the Chronicling America newspaper collection spanning 120 years. One of the significant challenges for utilizing digitized historical newspaper collections is the low quality of OCR text. Therefore, to enable realistic testing of QA models, our dataset can be used in three different ways: answering questions from raw and noisy content, answering questions from cleaner, corrected version of the content, as well as answering questions from scanned images of newspaper pages. This and the fact that ChroniclingAmericaQA spans the longest time period among available QA datasets make it quite a unique and useful resource.
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publishDate 2024
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spellingShingle ChroniclingAmericaQA: A Large-scale Question Answering Dataset based on Historical American Newspaper Pages
Piryani, Bhawna
Mozafari, Jamshid
Jatowt, Adam
Computation and Language
Question answering (QA) and Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) tasks have significantly advanced in recent years due to the rapid development of deep learning techniques and, more recently, large language models. At the same time, many benchmark datasets have become available for QA and MRC tasks. However, most existing large-scale benchmark datasets have been created predominantly using synchronous document collections like Wikipedia or the Web. Archival document collections, such as historical newspapers, contain valuable information from the past that is still not widely used to train large language models. To further contribute to advancing QA and MRC tasks and to overcome the limitation of previous datasets, we introduce ChroniclingAmericaQA, a large-scale temporal QA dataset with 487K question-answer pairs created based on the historical newspaper collection Chronicling America. Our dataset is constructed from a subset of the Chronicling America newspaper collection spanning 120 years. One of the significant challenges for utilizing digitized historical newspaper collections is the low quality of OCR text. Therefore, to enable realistic testing of QA models, our dataset can be used in three different ways: answering questions from raw and noisy content, answering questions from cleaner, corrected version of the content, as well as answering questions from scanned images of newspaper pages. This and the fact that ChroniclingAmericaQA spans the longest time period among available QA datasets make it quite a unique and useful resource.
title ChroniclingAmericaQA: A Large-scale Question Answering Dataset based on Historical American Newspaper Pages
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.17859