From Superficial to Deep: Integrating External Knowledge for Follow-up Question Generation Using Knowledge Graph and LLM

Jianyu Liu, Yi Huang, Sheng Bi, Junlan Feng, Guilin Qi


Abstract
In a conversational system, dynamically generating follow-up questions based on context can help users explore information and provide a better user experience. Humans are usually able to ask questions that involve some general life knowledge and demonstrate higher order cognitive skills. However, the questions generated by existing methods are often limited to shallow contextual questions that are uninspiring and have a large gap to the human level. In this paper, we propose a three-stage external knowledge-enhanced follow-up question generation method, which generates questions by identifying contextual topics, constructing a knowledge graph (KG) online, and finally combining these with a large language model to generate the final question. The model generates information-rich and exploratory follow-up questions by introducing external common sense knowledge and performing a knowledge fusion operation. Experiments show that compared to baseline models, our method generates questions that are more informative and closer to human questioning levels while maintaining contextual relevance.
Anthology ID:
2025.coling-main.55
Volume:
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Owen Rambow, Leo Wanner, Marianna Apidianaki, Hend Al-Khalifa, Barbara Di Eugenio, Steven Schockaert
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
828–840
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.55/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jianyu Liu, Yi Huang, Sheng Bi, Junlan Feng, and Guilin Qi. 2025. From Superficial to Deep: Integrating External Knowledge for Follow-up Question Generation Using Knowledge Graph and LLM. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 828–840, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
From Superficial to Deep: Integrating External Knowledge for Follow-up Question Generation Using Knowledge Graph and LLM (Liu et al., COLING 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.55.pdf