@InProceedings{rao-daumiii:2018:Long,
  author    = {Rao, Sudha  and  Daumé III, Hal},
  title     = {Learning to Ask Good Questions: Ranking Clarification Questions using Neural Expected Value of Perfect Information},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)},
  month     = {July},
  year      = {2018},
  address   = {Melbourne, Australia},
  publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics},
  pages     = {2737--2746},
  abstract  = {Inquiry is fundamental to communication, and machines cannot effectively collaborate with humans unless they can ask questions. In this work, we build a neural network model for the task of ranking clarification questions. Our model is inspired by the idea of expected value of perfect information: a good question is one whose expected answer will be useful. We study this problem using data from StackExchange, a plentiful online resource in which people routinely ask clarifying questions to posts so that they can better offer assistance to the original poster. We create a dataset of clarification questions consisting of 77K posts paired with a clarification question (and answer) from three domains of StackExchange: askubuntu, unix and superuser. We evaluate our model on 500 samples of this dataset against expert human judgments and demonstrate significant improvements over controlled baselines.},
  url       = {http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P18-1255}
}