PQuAD: A Persian question answering dataset

We present the Persian Question Answering Dataset (PQuAD), a crowdsourced reading com-prehension dataset on Persian Wikipedia articles. It includes 80,000 questions along with their answers, with 25% of the questions being adversarially unanswerable. We examine various properties of the dataset to show the diversity and the level of its difficulty as a MRC benchmark. By releasing this dataset, we aim to ease research on Persian reading comprehension and the development of Persian question answering systems. Our experiments on different state-of-the-art pre-trained contextualized language models show 74.8% Exact Match (EM) and 87.6% F1-score that can be used as the baseline results for further research on Persian QA.