Exploring unanswerability in machine reading comprehension: approaches, benchmarks, and open challenges

The challenge of unanswerable questions in Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) has drawn considerable attention, as current MRC systems are typically designed under the assumption that every question has a valid answer within the provided context. However, these systems often encounter real-world situations where no valid answer is available. This paper provides a comprehensive review of existing methods for addressing unanswerable questions in MRC systems, categorizing them into model-agnostic and model-specific approaches. It explores key strategies, examines relevant datasets, and evaluates commonly used metrics. This work aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of current techniques and identify critical gaps in the field, offering insights and key challenges to direct future research toward developing more robust MRC systems capable of handling unanswerable questions.