Educational Question Generation of Children Storybooks via Question Type Distribution Learning and Event-centric Summarization

Zhenjie Zhao, Yufang Hou, Dakuo Wang, Mo Yu, Chengzhong Liu, Xiaojuan Ma


Abstract
Generating educational questions of fairytales or storybooks is vital for improving children’s literacy ability. However, it is challenging to generate questions that capture the interesting aspects of a fairytale story with educational meaningfulness. In this paper, we propose a novel question generation method that first learns the question type distribution of an input story paragraph, and then summarizes salient events which can be used to generate high-cognitive-demand questions. To train the event-centric summarizer, we finetune a pre-trained transformer-based sequence-to-sequence model using silver samples composed by educational question-answer pairs. On a newly proposed educational question-answering dataset FairytaleQA, we show good performance of our method on both automatic and human evaluation metrics. Our work indicates the necessity of decomposing question type distribution learning and event-centric summary generation for educational question generation.
Anthology ID:
2022.acl-long.348
Volume:
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
May
Year:
2022
Address:
Dublin, Ireland
Editors:
Smaranda Muresan, Preslav Nakov, Aline Villavicencio
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5073–5085
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-long.348
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.acl-long.348
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zhenjie Zhao, Yufang Hou, Dakuo Wang, Mo Yu, Chengzhong Liu, and Xiaojuan Ma. 2022. Educational Question Generation of Children Storybooks via Question Type Distribution Learning and Event-centric Summarization. In Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 5073–5085, Dublin, Ireland. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Educational Question Generation of Children Storybooks via Question Type Distribution Learning and Event-centric Summarization (Zhao et al., ACL 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-long.348.pdf
Software:
 2022.acl-long.348.software.zip
Code
 zhaozj89/Educational-Question-Generation
Data
FairytaleQA