Capturing Greater Context for Question Generation

Automatic question generation can benefit many applications ranging from dialogue systems to reading comprehension. While questions are often asked with respect to long documents, there are many challenges with modeling such long documents. Many existing techniques generate questions by effectively...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Tuan, Luu Anh, Shah, Darsh J.(Darsh Jaidip), Barzilay, Regina
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) 2020
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/128714
Description
Summary:Automatic question generation can benefit many applications ranging from dialogue systems to reading comprehension. While questions are often asked with respect to long documents, there are many challenges with modeling such long documents. Many existing techniques generate questions by effectively looking at one sentence at a time, leading to questions that are easy and not reflective of the human process of question generation. Our goal is to incorporate interactions across multiple sentences to generate realistic questions for long documents. In order to link a broad document context to the target answer, we represent the relevant context via a multi-stage attention mechanism, which forms the foundation of a sequence to sequence model. We outperform state-of-the-art methods on question generation on three question-answering datasets - SQuAD, MS MARCO and NewsQA.