  Reading comprehension (RC) has been studied in a variety of datasets with the
boosted performance brought by deep neural networks. However, the
generalization capability of these models across different domains remains
unclear. To alleviate this issue, we are going to investigate unsupervised
domain adaptation on RC, wherein a model is trained on labeled source domain
and to be applied to the target domain with only unlabeled samples. We first
show that even with the powerful BERT contextual representation, the
performance is still unsatisfactory when the model trained on one dataset is
directly applied to another target dataset. To solve this, we provide a novel
conditional adversarial self-training method (CASe). Specifically, our approach
leverages a BERT model fine-tuned on the source dataset along with the
confidence filtering to generate reliable pseudo-labeled samples in the target
domain for self-training. On the other hand, it further reduces domain
distribution discrepancy through conditional adversarial learning across
domains. Extensive experiments show our approach achieves comparable accuracy
to supervised models on multiple large-scale benchmark datasets.
