Enhancing Question Generation with Commonsense Knowledge

Jia Xin, Wang Hao, Yin Dawei, Wu Yunfang


Abstract
Question generation (QG) is to generate natural and grammatical questions that can be answeredby a specific answer for a given context. Previous sequence-to-sequence models suffer from aproblem that asking high-quality questions requires commonsense knowledge as backgrounds which in most cases can not be learned directly from training data resulting in unsatisfactory questions deprived of knowledge. In this paper we propose a multi-task learning framework tointroduce commonsense knowledge into question generation process. We first retrieve relevant commonsense knowledge triples from mature databases and select triples with the conversion information from source context to question. Based on these informative knowledge triples wedesign two auxiliary tasks to incorporate commonsense knowledge into the main QG modelwhere one task is Concept Relation Classification and the other is Tail Concept Generation. Ex-perimental results on SQuAD show that our proposed methods are able to noticeably improvethe QG performance on both automatic and human evaluation metrics demonstrating that incor-porating external commonsense knowledge with multi-task learning can help the model generatehuman-like and high-quality questions.
Anthology ID:
2021.ccl-1.87
Volume:
Proceedings of the 20th Chinese National Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
August
Year:
2021
Address:
Huhhot, China
Editors:
Sheng Li (李生), Maosong Sun (孙茂松), Yang Liu (刘洋), Hua Wu (吴华), Kang Liu (刘康), Wanxiang Che (车万翔), Shizhu He (何世柱), Gaoqi Rao (饶高琦)
Venue:
CCL
SIG:
Publisher:
Chinese Information Processing Society of China
Note:
Pages:
976–987
Language:
English
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.ccl-1.87
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jia Xin, Wang Hao, Yin Dawei, and Wu Yunfang. 2021. Enhancing Question Generation with Commonsense Knowledge. In Proceedings of the 20th Chinese National Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 976–987, Huhhot, China. Chinese Information Processing Society of China.
Cite (Informal):
Enhancing Question Generation with Commonsense Knowledge (Xin et al., CCL 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.ccl-1.87.pdf
Data
ConceptNet