Summary-Oriented Question Generation for Informational Queries

Xusen Yin, Li Zhou, Kevin Small, Jonathan May


Abstract
Users frequently ask simple factoid questions for question answering (QA) systems, attenuating the impact of myriad recent works that support more complex questions. Prompting users with automatically generated suggested questions (SQs) can improve user understanding of QA system capabilities and thus facilitate more effective use. We aim to produce self-explanatory questions that focus on main document topics and are answerable with variable length passages as appropriate. We satisfy these requirements by using a BERT-based Pointer-Generator Network trained on the Natural Questions (NQ) dataset. Our model shows SOTA performance of SQ generation on the NQ dataset (20.1 BLEU-4). We further apply our model on out-of-domain news articles, evaluating with a QA system due to the lack of gold questions and demonstrate that our model produces better SQs for news articles – with further confirmation via a human evaluation.
Anthology ID:
2021.dialdoc-1.11
Volume:
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Document-grounded Dialogue and Conversational Question Answering (DialDoc 2021)
Month:
August
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Song Feng, Siva Reddy, Malihe Alikhani, He He, Yangfeng Ji, Mohit Iyyer, Zhou Yu
Venue:
dialdoc
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
81–97
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.dialdoc-1.11
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.dialdoc-1.11
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xusen Yin, Li Zhou, Kevin Small, and Jonathan May. 2021. Summary-Oriented Question Generation for Informational Queries. In Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Document-grounded Dialogue and Conversational Question Answering (DialDoc 2021), pages 81–97, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Summary-Oriented Question Generation for Informational Queries (Yin et al., dialdoc 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.dialdoc-1.11.pdf
Data
HotpotQAMS MARCONatural QuestionsSQuADTriviaQA