Controllable Open-ended Question Generation with A New Question Type Ontology

Shuyang Cao, Lu Wang


Abstract
We investigate the less-explored task of generating open-ended questions that are typically answered by multiple sentences. We first define a new question type ontology which differentiates the nuanced nature of questions better than widely used question words. A new dataset with 4,959 questions is labeled based on the new ontology. We then propose a novel question type-aware question generation framework, augmented by a semantic graph representation, to jointly predict question focuses and produce the question. Based on this framework, we further use both exemplars and automatically generated templates to improve controllability and diversity. Experiments on two newly collected large-scale datasets show that our model improves question quality over competitive comparisons based on automatic metrics. Human judges also rate our model outputs highly in answerability, coverage of scope, and overall quality. Finally, our model variants with templates can produce questions with enhanced controllability and diversity.
Anthology ID:
2021.acl-long.502
Volume:
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Chengqing Zong, Fei Xia, Wenjie Li, Roberto Navigli
Venues:
ACL | IJCNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6424–6439
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.502
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.acl-long.502
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Shuyang Cao and Lu Wang. 2021. Controllable Open-ended Question Generation with A New Question Type Ontology. In Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 6424–6439, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Controllable Open-ended Question Generation with A New Question Type Ontology (Cao & Wang, ACL-IJCNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.502.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.502.mp4
Code
 ShuyangCao/open-ended_question_ontology
Data
MS MARCOSQuAD