Graph reasoning contributes to the integration of discretely-distributed attentive information (clues) for Multi-party Dialogue Reading Comprehension (MDRC). This is attributed primarily to multi-hop reasoning over global conversational structures. However, existing approaches barely apply questions for anti-noise graph reasoning. More seriously, the local semantic structures in utterances are neglected, although they are beneficial for bridging across semantically-related clues. In this paper, we propose a question-aware global-to-local graph reasoning approach. It expands the canonical Interlocutor-Utterance graph by introducing a question node, enabling comprehensive global graph reasoning. More importantly, it constructs a semantic-role graph for each utterance, and accordingly performs local graph reasoning conditioned on the semantic relations. We design a two-stage encoder network to implement the progressive reasoning from the global graph to local. The experiments on the benchmark datasets Molweni and FriendsQA show that our approach yields significant improvements, compared to BERT and ELECTRA baselines. It achieves 73.6% and 77.2% F1-scores on Molweni and FriendsQA, respectively, outperforming state-of-the-art methods that employ different pretrained language models as backbones.

Conversational Question Answering (CQA) aims to provide natural language answers to users in information-seeking dialogues. Existing CQA benchmarks often evaluate models using pre-collected human-human conversations. However, replacing the model-predicted dialogue history with ground truth compromises the naturalness and sustainability of CQA evaluation. While previous studies proposed using predicted history and rewriting techniques to address unresolved coreferences and incoherencies, this approach renders the question self-contained from the conversation. In this paper, we propose a novel automatic evaluation approach, interview evaluation. Specifically, ChatGPT acts as the interviewer (Q agent) with a set of carefully designed prompts, and the CQA model under test serves as the interviewee (A agent). During the interview evaluation, questions are dynamically generated by the Q agent to guide the A agent in predicting the correct answer through an interactive process. We evaluated four different models on QuAC and two models on CoQA in our experiments. The experiment results demonstrate that our interview evaluation has advantages over previous CQA evaluation approaches, particularly in terms of naturalness and coherence. The source code is made publicly available.