Academic secretaries and faculty members of higher education institutions face a common problem:
the abundance of questions sent by academics
whose answers are found in available institutional documents.
The official documents produced by Brazilian public universities are vast and disperse,
which discourage students to further search for answers in such sources.
In order to lessen this problem, we present FaQuAD:
a novel machine reading comprehension dataset
in the domain of Brazilian higher education institutions.
FaQuAD follows the format of SQuAD (Stanford Question Answering Dataset) [Rajpurkar et al. 2016].
It comprises 900 questions about 249 reading passages (paragraphs),
which were taken from 18 official documents of a computer science college
from a Brazilian federal university
and 21 Wikipedia articles related to Brazilian higher education system.
As far as we know, this is the first Portuguese reading comprehension dataset in this format.
