Answer-focused and position-aware neural question generation

X Sun, J Liu, Y Lyu, W He, Y Ma… - Proceedings of the 2018 …, 2018 - aclanthology.org
Proceedings of the 2018 conference on empirical methods in natural …, 2018aclanthology.org
In this paper, we focus on the problem of question generation (QG). Recent neural network-
based approaches employ the sequence-to-sequence model which takes an answer and its
context as input and generates a relevant question as output. However, we observe two
major issues with these approaches:(1) The generated interrogative words (or question
words) do not match the answer type.(2) The model copies the context words that are far
from and irrelevant to the answer, instead of the words that are close and relevant to the …
Abstract
In this paper, we focus on the problem of question generation (QG). Recent neural network-based approaches employ the sequence-to-sequence model which takes an answer and its context as input and generates a relevant question as output. However, we observe two major issues with these approaches:(1) The generated interrogative words (or question words) do not match the answer type.(2) The model copies the context words that are far from and irrelevant to the answer, instead of the words that are close and relevant to the answer. To address these two issues, we propose an answer-focused and position-aware neural question generation model.(1) By answer-focused, we mean that we explicitly model question word generation by incorporating the answer embedding, which can help generate an interrogative word matching the answer type.(2) By position-aware, we mean that we model the relative distance between the context words and the answer. Hence the model can be aware of the position of the context words when copying them to generate a question. We conduct extensive experiments to examine the effectiveness of our model. The experimental results show that our model significantly improves the baseline and outperforms the state-of-the-art system.
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