QED is a linguistically principled framework for explanations in question answering. Given a question and a passage, QED represents an explanation of the answer as a combination of discrete, human-interpretable steps: sentence selection := identification of a sentence implying an answer to the question referential equality := identification of noun phrases in the question and the answer sentence that refer to the same thing predicate entailment := confirmation that the predicate in the sentence entails the predicate in the question once referential equalities are abstracted away. The QED dataset is an expert-annotated dataset of QED explanations build upon a subset of the Google Natural Questions dataset.