Generating Diverse and Consistent QA pairs from Contexts with Information-Maximizing Hierarchical Conditional VAEs

Dong Bok Lee, Seanie Lee, Woo Tae Jeong, Donghwan Kim, Sung Ju Hwang


Abstract
One of the most crucial challenges in question answering (QA) is the scarcity of labeled data, since it is costly to obtain question-answer (QA) pairs for a target text domain with human annotation. An alternative approach to tackle the problem is to use automatically generated QA pairs from either the problem context or from large amount of unstructured texts (e.g. Wikipedia). In this work, we propose a hierarchical conditional variational autoencoder (HCVAE) for generating QA pairs given unstructured texts as contexts, while maximizing the mutual information between generated QA pairs to ensure their consistency. We validate our Information Maximizing Hierarchical Conditional Variational AutoEncoder (Info-HCVAE) on several benchmark datasets by evaluating the performance of the QA model (BERT-base) using only the generated QA pairs (QA-based evaluation) or by using both the generated and human-labeled pairs (semi-supervised learning) for training, against state-of-the-art baseline models. The results show that our model obtains impressive performance gains over all baselines on both tasks, using only a fraction of data for training.
Anthology ID:
2020.acl-main.20
Volume:
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
July
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Dan Jurafsky, Joyce Chai, Natalie Schluter, Joel Tetreault
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
208–224
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.20
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.20
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Dong Bok Lee, Seanie Lee, Woo Tae Jeong, Donghwan Kim, and Sung Ju Hwang. 2020. Generating Diverse and Consistent QA pairs from Contexts with Information-Maximizing Hierarchical Conditional VAEs. In Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 208–224, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Generating Diverse and Consistent QA pairs from Contexts with Information-Maximizing Hierarchical Conditional VAEs (Lee et al., ACL 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.20.pdf
Video:
 http://slideslive.com/38928851
Code
 seanie12/Info-HCVAE
Data
Natural QuestionsSQuADTriviaQA