Abstract The ability of an agent to rationally answer questions about a given task is the key measure of its intelligence. While we have obtained phenomenal performance over various language and vision tasks separately, ‘Technical, Hard and Explainable Question Answering’ (THE-QA) is a new challenging corpus which addresses them jointly. THE-QA is a question answering task involving diagram understanding and reading comprehension. We plan to establish benchmarks over this new corpus using deep learning models guided by knowledge representation methods. The proposed approach will envisage detailed semantic parsing of technical figures and text, which is robust against diverse formats. It will be aided by knowledge acquisition and reasoning module that categorizes different knowledge types, identify sources to acquire that knowledge and perform reasoning to answer the questions correctly. THE-QA data will present a strong challenge to the community for future research and will bridge the gap between state-of-the-art Artifi- cial Intelligence (AI) and ‘Human-level’ AI