Conversational Machine Reading Comprehension for Vietnamese Healthcare Texts

Machine reading comprehension (MRC) is a sub-field in natural language processing or computational linguistics. MRC aims to help computers understand unstructured texts and then answer questions related to them. In this paper, we present a new Vietnamese corpus for conversational machine reading comprehension (ViCoQA), consisting of 10,000 questions with answers over 2,000 conversations about health news articles. We analyze ViCoQA in depth with different linguistic aspects. Then, we evaluate several baseline models about dialogue and reading comprehension on the ViCoQA corpus. The best model obtains an F1 score of 45.27%, which is 30.91 points behind human performance (76.18%), indicating that there is ample room for improvement.