Cross-lingual Transfer for Automatic Question Generation by Learning Interrogative Structures in Target Languages

Seonjeong Hwang, Yunsu Kim, Gary Lee


Abstract
Automatic question generation (QG) serves a wide range of purposes, such as augmenting question-answering (QA) corpora, enhancing chatbot systems, and developing educational materials. Despite its importance, most existing datasets predominantly focus on English, resulting in a considerable gap in data availability for other languages. Cross-lingual transfer for QG (XLT-QG) addresses this limitation by allowing models trained on high-resource language datasets to generate questions in low-resource languages. In this paper, we propose a simple and efficient XLT-QG method that operates without the need for monolingual, parallel, or labeled data in the target language, utilizing a small language model. Our model, trained solely on English QA datasets, learns interrogative structures from a limited set of question exemplars, which are then applied to generate questions in the target language. Experimental results show that our method outperforms several XLT-QG baselines and achieves performance comparable to GPT-3.5-turbo across different languages. Additionally, the synthetic data generated by our model proves beneficial for training multilingual QA models. With significantly fewer parameters than large language models and without requiring additional training for target languages, our approach offers an effective solution for QG and QA tasks across various languages.
Anthology ID:
2024.emnlp-main.186
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3194–3208
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.186
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Seonjeong Hwang, Yunsu Kim, and Gary Lee. 2024. Cross-lingual Transfer for Automatic Question Generation by Learning Interrogative Structures in Target Languages. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 3194–3208, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Cross-lingual Transfer for Automatic Question Generation by Learning Interrogative Structures in Target Languages (Hwang et al., EMNLP 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.186.pdf
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