Machine Comprehension by Text-to-Text Neural Question Generation

Xingdi Yuan, Tong Wang, Caglar Gulcehre, Alessandro Sordoni, Philip Bachman, Saizheng Zhang, Sandeep Subramanian, Adam Trischler


Abstract
We propose a recurrent neural model that generates natural-language questions from documents, conditioned on answers. We show how to train the model using a combination of supervised and reinforcement learning. After teacher forcing for standard maximum likelihood training, we fine-tune the model using policy gradient techniques to maximize several rewards that measure question quality. Most notably, one of these rewards is the performance of a question-answering system. We motivate question generation as a means to improve the performance of question answering systems. Our model is trained and evaluated on the recent question-answering dataset SQuAD.
Anthology ID:
W17-2603
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Representation Learning for NLP
Month:
August
Year:
2017
Address:
Vancouver, Canada
Editors:
Phil Blunsom, Antoine Bordes, Kyunghyun Cho, Shay Cohen, Chris Dyer, Edward Grefenstette, Karl Moritz Hermann, Laura Rimell, Jason Weston, Scott Yih
Venue:
RepL4NLP
SIG:
SIGREP
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
15–25
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W17-2603
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W17-2603
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xingdi Yuan, Tong Wang, Caglar Gulcehre, Alessandro Sordoni, Philip Bachman, Saizheng Zhang, Sandeep Subramanian, and Adam Trischler. 2017. Machine Comprehension by Text-to-Text Neural Question Generation. In Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Representation Learning for NLP, pages 15–25, Vancouver, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Machine Comprehension by Text-to-Text Neural Question Generation (Yuan et al., RepL4NLP 2017)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W17-2603.pdf
Code
 additional community code
Data
SQuAD