Towards Automatic Generation of Questions from Long Answers (original) (raw)

Transformer-based End-to-End Question Generation

ArXiv, 2020

Question Generation (QG) is an important task in Natural Language Processing (NLP) that involves generating questions automatically when given a context paragraph. While many techniques exist for the task of QG, they employ complex model architectures, extensive features, and additional mechanisms to boost model performance. In this work, we show that transformer-based finetuning techniques can be used to create robust question generation systems using only a single pretrained language model, without the use of additional mechanisms, answer metadata, and extensive features. Our best model outperforms previous more complex RNN-based Seq2Seq models, with an 8.62 and a 14.27 increase in METEOR and ROUGE_L scores, respectively. We show that it also performs on par with Seq2Seq models that employ answer-awareness and other special mechanisms, despite being only a single-model system. We analyze how various factors affect the model's performance, such as input data formatting, the len...

Exploring Answer Information Methods for Question Generation with Transformers

arXiv (Cornell University), 2023

There has been a lot of work in question generation where different methods to provide target answers as input, have been employed. This experimentation has been mostly carried out for RNN based models. We use three different methods and their combinations for incorporating answer information and explore their effect on several automatic evaluation metrics. The methods that are used are answer prompting, using a custom product method using answer embeddings and encoder outputs, choosing sentences from the input paragraph that have answer related information, and using a separate cross-attention attention block in the decoder which attends to the answer. We observe that answer prompting without any additional modes obtains the best scores across rouge, meteor scores. Additionally, we use a custom metric to calculate how many of the generated questions have the same answer, as the answer which is used to generate them.

Simplifying Paragraph-level Question Generation via Transformer Language Models

2021

Question generation (QG) is a natural language generation task where a model is trained to ask questions corresponding to some input text. Most recent approaches frame QG as a sequence-to-sequence problem and rely on additional features and mechanisms to increase performance; however, these often increase model complexity, and can rely on auxiliary data unavailable in practical use. A single Transformer-based unidirectional language model leveraging transfer learning can be used to produce high quality questions while disposing of additional task-specific complexity. Our QG model, finetuned from GPT-2 Small, outperforms several paragraph-level QG baselines on the SQuAD dataset by 0.95 METEOR points. Human evaluators rated questions as easy to answer, relevant to their context paragraph, and corresponding well to natural human speech. Also introduced is a new set of baseline scores on the RACE dataset, which has not previously been used for QG tasks. Further experimentation with vary...

Vocabulary Matters: A Simple yet Effective Approach to Paragraph-level Question Generation

2020

Question generation (QG) has recently attracted considerable attention. Most of the current neural models take as input only one or two sentences, and perform poorly when multiple sentences or complete paragraphs are given as input. However, in real-world scenarios it is very important to be able to generate high-quality questions from complete paragraphs. In this paper, we present a simple yet effective technique for answer-aware question generation from paragraphs. We augment a basic sequence-to-sequence QG model with dynamic, paragraph-specific dictionary and copy attention that is persistent across the corpus, without requiring features generated by sophisticated NLP pipelines or handcrafted rules. Our evaluation on SQuAD shows that our model significantly outperforms current state-of-the-art systems in question generation from paragraphs in both automatic and human evaluation. We achieve a 6-point improvement over the best system on BLEU-4, from 16.38 to 22.62.

Asking Questions the Human Way: Scalable Question-Answer Generation from Text Corpus

Proceedings of The Web Conference 2020, 2020

The ability to ask questions is important in both human and machine intelligence. Learning to ask questions helps knowledge acquisition, improves question-answering and machine reading comprehension tasks, and helps a chatbot to keep the conversation flowing with a human. Existing question generation models are ineffective at generating a large amount of high-quality question-answer pairs from unstructured text, since given an answer and an input passage, question generation is inherently a one-to-many mapping. In this paper, we propose Answer-Clue-Style-aware Question Generation (ACS-QG), which aims at automatically generating high-quality and diverse question-answer pairs from unlabeled text corpus at scale by imitating the way a human asks questions. Our system consists of: i) an information extractor, which samples from the text multiple types of assistive information to guide question generation; ii) neural question generators, which generate diverse and controllable questions, leveraging the extracted assistive information; and iii) a neural quality controller, which removes low-quality generated data based on text entailment. We compare our question generation models with existing approaches and resort to voluntary human evaluation to assess the quality of the generated question-answer pairs. The evaluation results suggest that our system dramatically outperforms state-of-the-art neural question generation models in terms of the generation quality, while being scalable in the meantime. With models trained on a relatively smaller amount of data, we can generate 2.8 million quality-assured question-answer pairs from a million sentences found in Wikipedia. CCS CONCEPTS • Computing methodologies → Natural language processing; Natural language generation; Machine translation.

ParaQG: A System for Generating Questions and Answers from Paragraphs

Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP): System Demonstrations, 2019

Generating syntactically and semantically valid and relevant questions from paragraphs is useful with many applications. Manual generation is a labour-intensive task, as it requires the reading, parsing and understanding of long passages of text. A number of question generation models based on sequence-to-sequence techniques have recently been proposed. Most of them generate questions from sentences only, and none of them is publicly available as an easy-to-use service. In this paper, we demonstrate ParaQG, a Web-based system for generating questions from sentences and paragraphs. ParaQG incorporates a number of novel functionalities to make the question generation process user-friendly. It provides an interactive interface for a user to select answers with visual insights on generation of questions. It also employs various faceted views to group similar questions as well as filtering techniques to eliminate unanswerable questions.

Answer-driven Deep Question Generation based on Reinforcement Learning

Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Deep question generation (DQG) aims to generate complex questions through reasoning over multiple documents. The task is challenging and underexplored. Existing methods mainly focus on enhancing document representations, with little attention paid to the answer information, which may result in the generated question not matching the answer type and being answerirrelevant. In this paper, we propose an Answer-driven Deep Question Generation (ADDQG) model based on the encoder-decoder framework. The model makes better use of the target answer as a guidance to facilitate question generation. First, we propose an answer-aware initialization module with a gated connection layer which introduces both document and answer information to the decoder, thus helping to guide the choice of answer-focused question words. Then a semantic-rich fusion attention mechanism is designed to support the decoding process, which integrates the answer with the document representations to promote the proper handling of answer information during generation. Moreover, reinforcement learning is applied to integrate both syntactic and semantic metrics as the reward to enhance the training of the ADDQG. Extensive experiments on the HotpotQA dataset show that ADDQG outperforms state-of-the-art models in both automatic and human evaluations.

Improving Question Answering with Generation of NQ-like Questions

Cornell University - arXiv, 2022

Question Answering (QA) systems require a large amount of annotated data which is costly and time-consuming to gather. Converting datasets of existing QA benchmarks are challenging due to different formats and complexities. To address these issues, we propose an algorithm to automatically generate shorter questions resembling day-today human communication in the Natural Questions (NQ) dataset from longer trivia questions in Quizbowl (QB) dataset by leveraging conversion in style among the datasets. This provides an automated way to generate more data for our QA systems. To ensure quality as well as quantity of data, we detect and remove illformed questions using a neural classifier. We demonstrate that in a low resource setting, using the generated data improves the QA performance over the baseline system on both NQ and QB data. Our algorithm improves the scalability of training data while maintaining quality of data for QA systems.

Controllable Question Generation via Sequence-to-Sequence Neural Model with Auxiliary Information

2020 International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN)

Automatic question generation (QG) has found applications in the education sector and to enhance human-machine interactions in chatbots. Existing neural QG models can be categorized into answer-unaware and answer-aware models. One of the main challenges faced by existing neural QG models is the degradation in performance due to the issue of one-tomany mapping, where, given a passage, both answer (query interest/question intent) and auxiliary information (context information present in the question) can result in different questions being generated. We propose a controllable question generation model (CQG) that employs an attentive sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) based generative model with copying mechanism. The proposed CQG also incorporates query interest and auxiliary information as controllers to address the one-to-many mapping problem in QG. Two variants of embedding strategies are designed for CQG to achieve good performance. To verify its performance, an automatic labeling scheme for harvesting auxiliary information is first developed. A QG dataset is also annotated with auxiliary information from a reading comprehension dataset. Performance evaluation shows that the proposed model not only outperforms existing QG models, it also has the potential to generate multiple questions that are relevant given a single passage.

Quiz-Style Question Generation for News Stories

Proceedings of the Web Conference 2021, 2021

A large majority of American adults get at least some of their news from the Internet. Even though many online news products have the goal of informing their users about the news, they lack scalable and reliable tools for measuring how well they are achieving this goal, and therefore have to resort to noisy proxy metrics (e.g., clickthrough rates or reading time) to track their performance. As a first step towards measuring news informedness at a scale, we study the problem of quiz-style multiple-choice question generation, which may be used to survey users about their knowledge of recent news. In particular, we formulate the problem as two sequence-to-sequence tasks: question-answer generation (QAG) and distractor, or incorrect answer, generation (DG). We introduce NewsQuizQA, the first dataset intended for quiz-style questionanswer generation, containing 20K human written question-answer pairs from 5K news article summaries. Using this dataset, we propose a series of novel techniques for applying large pre-trained Transformer encoder-decoder models, namely PEGASUS and T5, to the tasks of question-answer generation and distractor generation. We show that our models outperform strong baselines using both automated metrics and human raters. We provide a case study of running weekly quizzes on real-world users via the Google Surveys platform over the course of two months. We found that users generally found the automatically generated questions to be educational and enjoyable. Finally, to serve the research community, we are releasing the NewsQuizQA dataset. CCS CONCEPTS • Computing methodologies → Natural language generation.