BoolQ: Exploring the Surprising Difficulty of Natural Yes/No Questions

Reading comprehension dataset that queries for complex, non-factoid information, and require difficult entailment-like inference to solve.

Overview

BoolQ is a benchmark containing natural questions that have simple yes/no answers.

Usage

Installation

There are two ways of using Inspect Evals, from pypi as a dependency of your own project and as a standalone checked out GitHub repository.

If you are using it from pypi, install the package and its dependencies via:

pip install inspect-evals

If you are using Inspect Evals in its repository, start by installing the necessary dependencies with:

uv sync

Running evaluations

Now you can start evaluating models. For simplicity’s sake, this section assumes you are using Inspect Evals from the standalone repo. If that’s not the case and you are not using uv to manage dependencies in your own project, you can use the same commands with uv run dropped.

uv run inspect eval inspect_evals/boolq --model openai/gpt-5-nano

You can also import tasks as normal Python objects and run them from python:

from inspect_ai import eval
from inspect_evals.boolq import boolq
eval(boolq)

After running evaluations, you can view their logs using the inspect view command:

uv run inspect view

For VS Code, you can also download Inspect AI extension for viewing logs.

If you don’t want to specify the --model each time you run an evaluation, create a .env configuration file in your working directory that defines the INSPECT_EVAL_MODEL environment variable along with your API key. For example:

INSPECT_EVAL_MODEL=anthropic/claude-opus-4-1-20250805
ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=<anthropic-api-key>

Options

You can control a variety of options from the command line. For example:

uv run inspect eval inspect_evals/boolq --limit 10
uv run inspect eval inspect_evals/boolq --max-connections 10
uv run inspect eval inspect_evals/boolq --temperature 0.5

See uv run inspect eval --help for all available options.

Parameters

boolq

• shuffle (bool): (default: True)

Dataset

BoolQ is a question answering dataset for yes/no questions containing 3,270 samples. Each sample is a triplet of question, passage, answer.

Here is an example from the dataset (after processing by Inspect):

question: is harry potter and the escape from gringotts a roller coaster ride

passage: Harry Potter and the Escape from Gringotts is an indoor steel roller coaster at Universal Studios Florida, a theme park located within the Universal Orlando Resort. Similar to dark rides, the roller coaster utilizes special effects in a controlled-lighting environment and also employs motion-based 3-D projection of both animation and live-action sequences to enhance the experience. The ride, which is themed to the Gringotts Wizarding Bank, became the flagship attraction for the expanded Wizarding World of Harry Potter when it opened on July 8, 2014

Scoring

A simple accuracy is calculated over the datapoints.