Transformer-based End-to-End Question Generation

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.

Advances in Artificial Intelligence, 2020

The problem of automatic question generation from text is of increasing importance due to many useful applications. While deep neural networks achieved success in generating questions from text paragraphs, they mainly focused on a whole paragraph in generating questions, assuming all sentences are question-worthy sentences. However, a text paragraph often contains only a few important sentences that are worthy of asking questions. To that end, we present a feature-based sentence selection method for identifying question-worthy sentences. Such sentences are then used by a sequence-to-sequence (i.e., seq2seq) model to generate questions. Our experiments show that these features significantly improves the question generated by seq2seq models.

arXiv (Cornell University), 2019

Emerging research in Neural Question Generation (NQG) has started to integrate a larger variety of inputs, and generating questions requiring higher levels of cognition. These trends point to NQG as a bellwether for NLP, about how human intelligence embodies the skills of curiosity and integration. We present a comprehensive survey of neural question generation, examining the corpora, methodologies, and evaluation methods. From this, we elaborate on what we see as emerging on NQG's trend: in terms of the learning paradigms, input modalities, and cognitive levels considered by NQG. We end by pointing out the potential directions ahead.

2011

The First Shared Task Evaluation Challenge on Question Generation took place in 2010 as part of the 3 rd workshop on Question Generation. The campaign included two tasks: Question Generation from Sentences and Question Generation from Paragraphs. This status report briefly summarizes the motivation, tasks and results. Lessons learned relevant to future QG-STECs are also offered.

Procedia Computer Science, 2018

With exploding textual data on the internet with e-books, legal documents and products information, it is an opportunity to harness it for applications which can aid human tasks. Developing systems for question generation can be used for making frequently-askedquestions, creating school quiz-es and serve for the purpose of unified AI. Here in this study various encoder decoder architectures for generating questions from text inputs have been explored using Stanford's SQuAD dataset as for training development and test sets and evaluation metrics such as BLEU, ROUGUE and training time were used to compare the effectiveness of the models. The article develops upon the work of current end-to-end system by using gated recurrent unit in place of long short term memory which give similar accuracy but with lesser training time, further it also show the successfully use of a convolution based encoder for this task which gives results comparable to current state of the art system with much lesser training time.

Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2022

Question Generation (QG), as a challenging Natural Language Processing task, aims at generating questions based on given answers and context. Existing QG methods mainly focus on building or training models for specific QG datasets. These works are subject to two major limitations: (1) They are dedicated to specific QG formats (e.g., answer-extraction or multi-choice QG), therefore, if we want to address a new format of QG, a redesign of the QG model is required. (2) Optimal performance is only achieved on the dataset they were just trained on. As a result, we have to train and keep various QG models for different QG datasets, which is resource-intensive and ungeneralizable. To solve the problems, we propose a model named Unified-QG based on lifelong learning techniques, which can continually learn QG tasks across different datasets and formats. Specifically, we first build a format-convert encoding to transform different kinds of QG formats into a unified representation. Then, a method named STRIDER (SimilariT y RegularI zed Difficult Example Replay) is built to alleviate catastrophic forgetting in continual QG learning. Extensive experiments were conducted on 8 QG datasets across 4 QG formats (answer-extraction, answer-abstraction, multi-choice, and boolean QG) to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Experimental results demonstrate that our Unified-QG can effectively and continually adapt to QG tasks when datasets and formats vary. In addition, we verify the ability of a single trained Unified-QG model in improving 8 Question Answering (QA) systems' performance through generating synthetic QA data.

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.

Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Representation Learning for NLP, 2017

We propose a recurrent neural model that generates natural-language questions from documents, conditioned on answers. We show how to train the model using a combination of supervised and reinforcement learning. After teacher forcing for standard maximum likelihood training, we fine-tune the model using policy gradient techniques to maximize several rewards that measure question quality. Most notably, one of these rewards is the performance of a question-answering system. Our model is trained and evaluated on the recent question-answering dataset SQuAD.

International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education

Questioning plays a vital role in education, directing knowledge construction and assessing students’ understanding. However, creating high-level questions requires significant creativity and effort. Automatic question generation is expected to facilitate the generation of not only fluent and relevant but also educationally valuable questions. While rule-based methods are intuitive for short inputs, they struggle with longer and more complex inputs. Neural question generation (NQG) has shown better results in this regard. This review summarizes the advancements in NQG between 2016 and early 2022. The focus is on the development of NQG for educational purposes, including challenges and research opportunities. We found that although NQG can generate fluent and relevant factoid-type questions, few studies focus on education. Specifically, there is limited literature using context in the form of multi-paragraphs, which due to the input limitation of the current deep learning techniques,...

Question Generation is a field of research that has been growing in popularity through the years, as educators seek to find ways to make test generation a lot easier with the use of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence. In this paper we research how automated end-to-end question generation that utilizes transformers will generate an understandable question by making an inference on sample paragraphs. The model is trained in an end-to-end approach where the model focuses on the context paragraph to understand the sentences and generate a question where the answer is not directly in the context paragraph. An inference approach is proposed to find hidden sentences by using discourse analysis and paraphrasing techniques based on fine tuning transformers to be fed into a model that can generate a question from the hidden or new sentences. The Stanford parser was also utilized to get a clearer view of the parts of speech focusing particularly on the verbs, pronouns, and other key entities in the sentence. Experiments on the context paragraphs was conducted on the SQuAD 1.1 dataset where we attempted to transform the original input paragraphs using the inference rule. After transforming all sentences, we then fed these new shortened paragraphs to the transformer model to generate a deeper level understanding question.