Asking It All: Generating Contextualized Questions for any Semantic Role

Valentina Pyatkin, Paul Roit, Julian Michael, Yoav Goldberg, Reut Tsarfaty, Ido Dagan


Abstract
Asking questions about a situation is an inherent step towards understanding it. To this end, we introduce the task of role question generation, which, given a predicate mention and a passage, requires producing a set of questions asking about all possible semantic roles of the predicate. We develop a two-stage model for this task, which first produces a context-independent question prototype for each role and then revises it to be contextually appropriate for the passage. Unlike most existing approaches to question generation, our approach does not require conditioning on existing answers in the text. Instead, we condition on the type of information to inquire about, regardless of whether the answer appears explicitly in the text, could be inferred from it, or should be sought elsewhere. Our evaluation demonstrates that we generate diverse and well-formed questions for a large, broad-coverage ontology of predicates and roles.
Anthology ID:
2021.emnlp-main.108
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2021
Address:
Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
Editors:
Marie-Francine Moens, Xuanjing Huang, Lucia Specia, Scott Wen-tau Yih
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1429–1441
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.108
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-main.108
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Valentina Pyatkin, Paul Roit, Julian Michael, Yoav Goldberg, Reut Tsarfaty, and Ido Dagan. 2021. Asking It All: Generating Contextualized Questions for any Semantic Role. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 1429–1441, Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Asking It All: Generating Contextualized Questions for any Semantic Role (Pyatkin et al., EMNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.108.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.108.mp4
Code
 valentinapy/roleqgeneration
Data
NomBankQA-SRLQA-SRL Bank 2.0SQuAD