This paper introduces QAConv, a new question answering (QA) dataset that uses conversations as a knowledge source. We focus on informative conversations including business emails, panel discussions, and work channels. Unlike open-domain and task-oriented dialogues, these conversations are usually long, complex, asynchronous, and involve strong domain knowledge. In total, we collect 34,204 QA pairs, including span-based, free-form, and unanswerable questions, from 10,259 selected conversations with both human-written and machine-generated questions. We segment long conversations into chunks, and use a question generator and dialogue summarizer as auxiliary tools to collect multi-hop questions. The dataset has two testing scenarios, chunk mode and full mode, depending on whether the grounded chunk is provided or retrieved from a large conversational pool. Experimental results show that state-of-the-art QA systems trained on existing QA datasets have limited zero-shot ability and tend to predict our questions as unanswerable. Fine-tuning such systems on our corpus can achieve significant improvement up to 23.6% and 13.6% in both chunk mode and full mode, respectively.

该研究介绍了QAConv，这是一个新的基于对话的问题回答（QA）数据集，通过长、复杂、异步和涉及强领域知识的信息型对话提供了一个新的训练和评估测试平台来促进QA在对话研究中的应用。

QAConv：信息交流的问答