Web search is an essential way for humans to obtain information, but it's still a great challenge for machines to understand the contents of web pages. In this paper, we introduce the task of web-based structural reading comprehension. Given a web pa
ge and a question about it, the task is to find an answer from the web page. This task requires a system not only to understand the semantics of texts but also the structure of the web page. Moreover, we proposed WebSRC, a novel Web-based Structural Reading Comprehension dataset. WebSRC consists of 400K question-answer pairs, which are collected from 6.4K web pages with corresponding HTML source code, screenshots, and metadata. Each question in WebSRC requires a certain structural understanding of a web page to answer, and the answer is either a text span on the web page or yes/no. We evaluate various strong baselines on our dataset to show the difficulty of our task. We also investigate the usefulness of structural information and visual features. Our dataset and baselines have been publicly available.
Recently, end-to-end (E2E) trained models for question answering over knowledge graphs (KGQA) have delivered promising results using only a weakly supervised dataset. However, these models are trained and evaluated in a setting where hand-annotated q
uestion entities are supplied to the model, leaving the important and non-trivial task of entity resolution (ER) outside the scope of E2E learning. In this work, we extend the boundaries of E2E learning for KGQA to include the training of an ER component. Our model only needs the question text and the answer entities to train, and delivers a stand-alone QA model that does not require an additional ER component to be supplied during runtime. Our approach is fully differentiable, thanks to its reliance on a recent method for building differentiable KGs (Cohen et al., 2020). We evaluate our E2E trained model on two public datasets and show that it comes close to baseline models that use hand-annotated entities.
