A Comprehensive Survey on Multi-hop Machine Reading Comprehension Approaches

Machine reading comprehension (MRC) is a long-standing topic in natural language processing (NLP). The MRC task aims to answer a question based on the given context. Recently studies focus on multi-hop MRC which is a more challenging extension of MRC, which to answer a question some disjoint pieces of information across the context are required. Due to the complexity and importance of multi-hop MRC, a large number of studies have been focused on this topic in recent years, therefore, it is necessary and worth reviewing the related literature. This study aims to investigate recent advances in the multi-hop MRC approaches based on 31 studies from 2018 to 2022. In this regard, first, the multi-hop MRC problem definition will be introduced, then 31 models will be reviewed in detail with a strong focus on their multi-hop aspects. They also will be categorized based on their main techniques. Finally, a fine-grain comprehensive comparison of the models and techniques will be presented.