Automatic generation of questions from text has gained increasing attention due to its useful applications. We propose a novel question generation method that combines the benefits of rule-based and neural sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Seq) models. The proposed method can automatically generate multiple questions from an input sentence covering different views of the sentence as in rule-based methods, while more complicated “rules” can be learned via the Seq2Seq model. The method utilizes semantic role labeling to convert training examples into their semantic representations, and then trains a Seq2Seq model over the semantic representations. Our extensive experiments on three real-world data sets show that the proposed method significantly improves the state-of-the-art neural question generation approaches.

In this article we present a method for combining different information retrieval models in order to increase the retrieval performance in a Speech Information Retrieval task. The formulas for combining the models are tuned on training data. Then the system is evaluated on test data. The task is particularly difficult because the text collection is automatically transcribed spontaneous speech, with many recognition errors. Also, the topics are real information needs, difficult to satisfy. Information Retrieval systems are not able to obtain good results on this data set, except for the case when manual summaries are included.