Automated question generation has made great advances with the help of large NLP generation models. However, typically only one question is generated for each intended answer. We propose a new task, Multi-Question Generation, aimed at generating multiple semantically similar but lexically diverse questions assessing the same concept. We develop an evaluation framework based on desirable qualities of the resulting questions. Results comparing multiple question generation approaches in the two-question generation condition show a trade-off between question answerability and lexical diversity between the two questions. We also report preliminary results from sampling multiple questions from our model, to explore generating more than two questions. Our task can be used to further explore the educational impact of showing multiple distinct question wordings to students.

Automated question generation has the potential to greatly aid in education applications, such as online study aids to check understanding of readings. The state-of-the-art in neural question generation has advanced greatly, due in part to the availability of large datasets of question-answer pairs. However, the questions generated are often surface-level and not challenging for a human to answer. To develop more challenging questions, we propose the novel task of cause-and-effect question generation. We build a pipeline that extracts causal relations from passages of input text, and feeds these as input to a state-of-the-art neural question generator. The extractor is based on prior work that classifies causal relations by linguistic category (Cao et al., 2016; Altenberg, 1984). This work results in a new, publicly available collection of cause-and-effect questions. We evaluate via both automatic and manual metrics and find performance improves for both question generation and question answering when we utilize a small auxiliary data source of cause-and-effect questions for fine-tuning. Our approach can be easily applied to generate cause-and-effect questions from other text collections and educational material, allowing for adaptable large-scale generation of cause-and-effect questions.