# Conversational Question Answering: A Survey

Source: [Conversational Question Answering: A Survey](<https://www.sota2.com/research/paper/68fa6a0b1e209131cea25b3f>)

Collection index: [llms.txt](<https://www.sota2.com/research/llms.txt>)

Data updated: 2025-10-25T23:15:37.395Z

Authors: Munazza Zaib, Wei Emma Zhang, Quan Z. Sheng, Adnan Mahmood, Yang Zhang

Published: 2021-06-02T01:06:34.000Z

## Abstract

Question answering (QA) systems provide a way of querying the information available in various formats including, but not limited to, unstructured and structured data in natural languages. It constitutes a considerable part of conversational artificial intelligence (AI) which has led to the introduction of a special research topic on Conversational Question Answering (CQA), wherein a system is required to understand the given context and then engages in multi-turn QA to satisfy the user's information needs. Whilst the focus of most of the existing research work is subjected to single-turn QA, the field of multi-turn QA has recently grasped attention and prominence owing to the availability of large-scale, multi-turn QA datasets and the development of pre-trained language models. With a good amount of models and research papers adding to the literature every year recently, there is a dire need of arranging and presenting the related work in a unified manner to streamline future research. This survey, therefore, is an effort to present a comprehensive review of the state-of-the-art research trends of CQA primarily based on reviewed papers from 2016-2021. Our findings show that there has been a trend shift from single-turn to multi-turn QA which empowers the field of Conversational AI from different perspectives. This survey is intended to provide an epitome for the research community with the hope of laying a strong foundation for the field of CQA.

## 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](<https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.00874>)

[PDF](<https://arxiv.org/pdf/2106.00874.pdf>)