Danielle S McNamara
Other people with similar names: Danielle S. McNamara
2026
ORSO QGen: Odds-Ratio Steerable Optimization for Controlling Question Generation
Andreea Dutulescu | Stefan Ruseti | Mihai Dascalu | Danielle S McNamara
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2026
Andreea Dutulescu | Stefan Ruseti | Mihai Dascalu | Danielle S McNamara
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2026
Question generation plays an important role in educational applications, enabling automated assessment and reading comprehension support. Attribute-controlled question generation aims to produce questions that fit predefined characteristics such as difficulty, focus, or coverage. Existing methods predominantly rely on supervised fine-tuning, which often fails to impose a strong adherence to attribute values, resulting in weak coupling between prompt specifications and model outputs. We introduce Odds-Ratio Steerable Optimization (ORSO), a framework designed to enhance attribute sensitivity in question generation models. Building upon preference-based learning techniques without requiring human-curated preference sets, ORSO employs input-level perturbations to create contrastive training signals. Empirical evaluations on both exhaustive and expert-validated attribute configurations indicate that ORSO performs better in enforcing attribute conformity while maintaining output quality. These results argue for the benefits of explicit attribute-aware optimization in controllable question generation tasks.