Ask what’s missing and what’s useful: Improving Clarification Question Generation using Global Knowledge

Bodhisattwa Prasad Majumder, Sudha Rao, Michel Galley, Julian McAuley


Abstract
The ability to generate clarification questions i.e., questions that identify useful missing information in a given context, is important in reducing ambiguity. Humans use previous experience with similar contexts to form a global view and compare it to the given context to ascertain what is missing and what is useful in the context. Inspired by this, we propose a model for clarification question generation where we first identify what is missing by taking a difference between the global and the local view and then train a model to identify what is useful and generate a question about it. Our model outperforms several baselines as judged by both automatic metrics and humans.
Anthology ID:
2021.naacl-main.340
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies
Month:
June
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Kristina Toutanova, Anna Rumshisky, Luke Zettlemoyer, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Iz Beltagy, Steven Bethard, Ryan Cotterell, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Yichao Zhou
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4300–4312
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.340
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.naacl-main.340
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Bodhisattwa Prasad Majumder, Sudha Rao, Michel Galley, and Julian McAuley. 2021. Ask what’s missing and what’s useful: Improving Clarification Question Generation using Global Knowledge. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, pages 4300–4312, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Ask what’s missing and what’s useful: Improving Clarification Question Generation using Global Knowledge (Majumder et al., NAACL 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.340.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.340.mp4
Code
 microsoft/clarification-qgen-globalinfo