  Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) has become enormously popular recently
and has attracted a lot of attention. However, the existing reading
comprehension datasets are mostly in English. In this paper, we introduce a
Span-Extraction dataset for Chinese machine reading comprehension to add
language diversities in this area. The dataset is composed by near 20,000 real
questions annotated on Wikipedia paragraphs by human experts. We also annotated
a challenge set which contains the questions that need comprehensive
understanding and multi-sentence inference throughout the context. We present
several baseline systems as well as anonymous submissions for demonstrating the
difficulties in this dataset. With the release of the dataset, we hosted the
Second Evaluation Workshop on Chinese Machine Reading Comprehension (CMRC
2018). We hope the release of the dataset could further accelerate the Chinese
machine reading comprehension research. Resources are available:
https://github.com/ymcui/cmrc2018
