Leveraging Structured Information from a Passage to Generate Questions

Question Generation(QG)is the task of utilizing Artificial Intelligence(AI)technology to generate questions that can be answered by a span of text within a given passage.Existing research on QG in the educational field struggles with two challenges:the mainstream QG models based on seq-to-seq fail to utilize the structured information from the passage;the other is the lack of specialized educational QG datasets.To address the challenges,a specialized QG dataset,reading comprehension dataset from examinations for QG(named RACE4QG),is reconstructed by applying a new answer tagging approach and a data-filtering strategy to the RACE dataset.Further,an end-to-end QG model,which can exploit the intra-and inter-sentence information to generate better questions,is proposed.In our model,the encoder utilizes a Gated Recurrent Units(GRU)network,which takes the concatenation of word embedding,answer tagging,and Graph Attention neTworks(GAT)embedding as input.The hidden states of the GRU are operated with a gated self-attention to obtain the final passage-answer representation,which will be fed to the decoder.Results show that our model outperforms baselines on automatic metrics and human evaluation.Consequently,the model improves the baseline by 0.44,1.32,and 1.34 on BLEU-4,ROUGE-L,and METEOR metrics,respectively,indicating the effectivity and reliability of our model.Its gap with human expectations also reflects the research potential.