A core goal in artificial intelligence is to build systems that can read the web, and then answer complex questions about any topic. These question-answering (QA) systems could have a big impact on the way that we access information. Furthermore, open-domain question answering is a benchmark task in the development of Artificial Intelligence, since understanding text and being able to answer questions about it is something that we generally associate with intelligence.

To help spur development in open-domain question answering, we have created the Natural Questions (NQ) corpus, along with a challenge website based on this data. The NQ corpus contains questions from real users, and it requires QA systems to read and comprehend an entire Wikipedia article that may or may not contain the answer to the question. The inclusion of real user questions, and the requirement that solutions should read an entire page to find the answer, cause NQ to be a more realistic and challenging task than prior QA datasets.