def _improve_answer_span(doc_tokens, input_start, input_end, tokenizer,
                         orig_answer_text):
    """Returns tokenized answer spans that better match the annotated answer."""

    # The SQuAD annotations are character based. We first project them to
    # whitespace-tokenized words. But then after WordPiece tokenization, we can
    # often find a "better match". For example:
    #
    #   Question: What year was John Smith born?
    #   Context: The leader was John Smith (1895-1943).
    #   Answer: 1895
    #
    # The original whitespace-tokenized answer will be "(1895-1943).". However
    # after tokenization, our tokens will be "( 1895 - 1943 ) .". So we can match
    # the exact answer, 1895.
    #
    # However, this is not always possible. Consider the following:
    #
    #   Question: What country is the top exporter of electornics?
    #   Context: The Japanese electronics industry is the lagest in the world.
    #   Answer: Japan
    #
    # In this case, the annotator chose "Japan" as a character sub-span of
    # the word "Japanese". Since our WordPiece tokenizer does not split
    # "Japanese", we just use "Japanese" as the annotation. This is fairly rare
    # in SQuAD, but does happen.
    tok_answer_text = " ".join(tokenizer.tokenize(orig_answer_text))

    for new_start in range(input_start, input_end + 1):
        for new_end in range(input_end, new_start - 1, -1):
            text_span = " ".join(doc_tokens[new_start:(new_end + 1)])
            if text_span == tok_answer_text:
                return (new_start, new_end)

    return (input_start, input_end)
Returns tokenized answer spans that better match the annotated answer.
examples/question_answering/bert_run_squad_azureml.py