Chengzhong Liu
2022
Educational Question Generation of Children Storybooks via Question Type Distribution Learning and Event-centric Summarization
Zhenjie Zhao
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Yufang Hou
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Dakuo Wang
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Mo Yu
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Chengzhong Liu
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Xiaojuan Ma
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
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.