Conversational Machine Reading Comprehension for Vietnamese Healthcare Texts

Machine reading comprehension (MRC) is a sub-field in natural language processing that aims to help computers understand unstructured texts and then answer questions related to them. In practice, conversation is an essential way to communicate and transfer information. To help machines understand conversation texts, we present UIT-ViCoQA - a new corpus for conversational machine reading comprehension in the Vietnamese language. This corpus consists of 10,000 questions with answers to over 2,000 conversations about health news articles. Then, we evaluate several baseline approaches for conversational machine comprehension on the UIT-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.