# Hierarchical Question Answering for Long Documents Source: [Hierarchical Question Answering for Long Documents]() Collection index: [llms.txt]() Data updated: 2025-10-27T05:52:51.558Z Authors: Eunsol Choi, Daniel Hewlett, Alexandre Lacoste, Illia Polosukhin, Jakob Uszkoreit, Jonathan Berant Published: 2016-11-06T20:24:40.000Z ## Abstract We present a framework for question answering that can efficiently scale to longer documents while maintaining or even improving performance of state-of-the-art models. While most successful approaches for reading comprehension rely on recurrent neural networks (RNNs), running them over long documents is prohibitively slow because it is difficult to parallelize over sequences. Inspired by how people first skim the document, identify relevant parts, and carefully read these parts to produce an answer, we combine a coarse, fast model for selecting relevant sentences and a more expensive RNN for producing the answer from those sentences. We treat sentence selection as a latent variable trained jointly from the answer only using reinforcement learning. Experiments demonstrate the state of the art performance on a challenging subset of the Wikireading and on a new dataset, while speeding up the model by 3.5x-6.7x. ## Recorded benchmark results A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage. ## Original sources and implementation [Original paper]() [PDF]()