We present SkillQG: a question generation framework with controllable comprehension types for assessing and improving machine reading comprehension models. Existing question generation systems widely differentiate questions by literal information such as question words and answer types to generate semantically relevant questions for a given context. However, they rarely consider the comprehension nature of questions, i.e., the different comprehension capabilities embodied by different questions. In comparison, our SkillQG is able to tailor a fine-grained assessment and improvement to the capabilities of questions answering models built on it. Specifically, we first frame the comprehension type of questions based on a hierarchical skill-based schema. We then formulate SkillQG as a skill-conditioned question generator. Furthermore, to improve the controllability of generation, we augment the input text with skill-specific question focus and knowledge, which are constructed by iteratively prompting the pre-trained language models. Empirical results demonstrate that SkillQG outperforms baselines in terms of quality, relevance, and skill-controllability while showing a promising performance boost in downstream question answering task.

Relation extraction is often challenged by insufficient labeled data. Previous methods exploit knowledge from unlabeled data by generating pseudo labels in a self-training pipeline, which suffers a gradual drift problem. Logic rules, a transferable and explainable form of expert knowledge, have achieved promising success by improving the model with weak labels. But manually writing comprehensive rules set is challenging and tedious. To alleviate the human labor of writing high-quality rules, in this work, we propose ARIA, an Automatic task-specific Rules distilling framework. Specifically, we guide the pre-trained language model to reason rules as experts and compose them into robust compound rules for data labeling. Besides, ARIA could continuously enrich the rules set to power the labeling ability by discovering reliable model-labeled data for distinguishable rules generation. Experiments on two public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of ARIA in a low-resource scenario.

Existing metrics for assessing question generation not only require costly human reference but also fail to take into account the input context of generation, rendering the lack of deep understanding of the relevance between the generated questions and input contexts. As a result, they may wrongly penalize a legitimate and reasonable candidate question when it (1) involves complicated reasoning with the context or (2) can be grounded by multiple evidences in the context. In this paper, we propose QRelScore, a context-aware Relevance evaluation metric for Question Generation.Based on off-the-shelf language models such as BERT and GPT2, QRelScore employs both word-level hierarchical matching and sentence-level prompt-based generation to cope with the complicated reasoning and diverse generation from multiple evidences, respectively. Compared with existing metrics, our experiments demonstrate that QRelScore is able to achieve a higher correlation with human judgments while being much more robust to adversarial samples.

Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) reveals the ability to understand a given text passage and answer questions based on it. Existing research works in MRC rely heavily on large-size models and corpus to improve the performance evaluated by metrics such as Exact Match (EM) and F₁. However, such a paradigm lacks sufficient interpretation to model capability and can not efficiently train a model with a large corpus. In this paper, we argue that a deep understanding of model capabilities and data properties can help us feed a model with appropriate training data based on its learning status. Specifically, we design an MRC capability assessment framework that assesses model capabilities in an explainable and multi-dimensional manner. Based on it, we further uncover and disentangle the connections between various data properties and model performance. Finally, to verify the effectiveness of the proposed MRC capability assessment framework, we incorporate it into a curriculum learning pipeline and devise a Capability Boundary Breakthrough Curriculum (CBBC) strategy, which performs a model capability-based training to maximize the data value and improve training efficiency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly improves performance, achieving up to an 11.22% / 8.71% improvement of EM / F₁ on MRC tasks.