Asking Questions Like Educational Experts: Automatically Generating Question-Answer Pairs on Real-World Examination Data

Fanyi Qu, Xin Jia, Yunfang Wu


Abstract
Generating high quality question-answer pairs is a hard but meaningful task. Although previous works have achieved great results on answer-aware question generation, it is difficult to apply them into practical application in the education field. This paper for the first time addresses the question-answer pair generation task on the real-world examination data, and proposes a new unified framework on RACE. To capture the important information of the input passage we first automatically generate (rather than extracting) keyphrases, thus this task is reduced to keyphrase-question-answer triplet joint generation. Accordingly, we propose a multi-agent communication model to generate and optimize the question and keyphrases iteratively, and then apply the generated question and keyphrases to guide the generation of answers. To establish a solid benchmark, we build our model on the strong generative pre-training model. Experimental results show that our model makes great breakthroughs in the question-answer pair generation task. Moreover, we make a comprehensive analysis on our model, suggesting new directions for this challenging task.
Anthology ID:
2021.emnlp-main.202
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:
2583–2593
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.202
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-main.202
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Fanyi Qu, Xin Jia, and Yunfang Wu. 2021. Asking Questions Like Educational Experts: Automatically Generating Question-Answer Pairs on Real-World Examination Data. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 2583–2593, Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Asking Questions Like Educational Experts: Automatically Generating Question-Answer Pairs on Real-World Examination Data (Qu et al., EMNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.202.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.202.mp4
Data
RACESQuAD