GeoSQA: A Benchmark for Scenario-based Question Answering in the Geography Domain at High School Level

Scenario-based question answering (SQA) has attracted increasing research attention. It typically requires retrieving and integrating knowledge from multiple sources, and applying general knowledge to a specific case described by a scenario. SQA widely exists in the medical, geography, and legal domains---both in practice and in the exams. In this paper, we introduce the GeoSQA dataset. It consists of 1,981 scenarios and 4,110 multiple-choice questions in the geography domain at high school level, where diagrams (e.g., maps, charts) have been manually annotated with natural language descriptions to benefit NLP research. Benchmark results on a variety of state-of-the-art methods for question answering, textual entailment, and reading comprehension demonstrate the unique challenges presented by SQA for future research.Comment: 6 pages, to appear at the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019