An Empirical Comparison of LM-based Question and Answer Generation Methods

Asahi Ushio, Fernando Alva-Manchego, Jose Camacho-Collados

Findings: Question Answering Findings Paper

Session 1: Question Answering (Virtual Poster)
Conference Room: Pier 7&8
Conference Time: July 10, 11:00-12:30 (EDT) (America/Toronto)
Global Time: July 10, Session 1 (15:00-16:30 UTC)
Spotlight Session: Spotlight - Metropolitan East (Spotlight)
Conference Room: Metropolitan East
Conference Time: July 10, 19:00-21:00 (EDT) (America/Toronto)
Global Time: July 10, Spotlight Session (23:00-01:00 UTC)
Keywords: question generation
TLDR: Question and answer generation (QAG) consists of generating a set of question-answer pairs given a context (e.g.\ a paragraph). This task has a variety of applications, such as data augmentation for question answering (QA) models, information retrieval and education. In this paper, we establish base...
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Abstract: Question and answer generation (QAG) consists of generating a set of question-answer pairs given a context (e.g.\ a paragraph). This task has a variety of applications, such as data augmentation for question answering (QA) models, information retrieval and education. In this paper, we establish baselines with three different QAG methodologies that leverage sequence-to-sequence language model (LM) fine-tuning. Experiments show that an end-to-end QAG model, which is computationally light at both training and inference times, is generally robust and outperforms other more convoluted approaches. However, there are differences depending on the underlying generative LM. Finally, our analysis shows that QA models fine-tuned solely on generated question-answer pairs can be competitive when compared to supervised QA models trained on human-labeled data.