Most current question answering datasets frame the task as reading comprehension where the question is about a paragraph or document and the answer often is a span in the document.
Some specific tasks of reading comprehension include multi-modal machine reading comprehension and textual machine reading comprehension, among others. In the literature, machine reading comprehension can be divide into four categories: cloze style, multiple choice, span prediction, and free-form answer. Read more about each category here.
Benchmark datasets used for testing a model's reading comprehension abilities include MovieQA, ReCoRD, and RACE, among others.
The Machine Reading group at UCL also provides an overview of reading comprehension tasks.
Figure source: A Survey on Machine Reading Comprehension: Tasks, Evaluation Metrics and Benchmark Datasets