@inproceedings{rao-daume-iii-2018-learning,
    title = "Learning to Ask Good Questions: Ranking Clarification Questions using Neural Expected Value of Perfect Information",
    author = "Rao, Sudha  and
      Daum{\'e} III, Hal",
    editor = "Gurevych, Iryna  and
      Miyao, Yusuke",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2018",
    address = "Melbourne, Australia",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/add-emnlp-2024-awards/P18-1255/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/P18-1255",
    pages = "2737--2746",
    abstract = "Inquiry is fundamental to communication, and machines cannot effectively collaborate with humans unless they can ask questions. In this work, we build a neural network model for the task of ranking clarification questions. Our model is inspired by the idea of expected value of perfect information: a good question is one whose expected answer will be useful. We study this problem using data from StackExchange, a plentiful online resource in which people routinely ask clarifying questions to posts so that they can better offer assistance to the original poster. We create a dataset of clarification questions consisting of 77K posts paired with a clarification question (and answer) from three domains of StackExchange: askubuntu, unix and superuser. We evaluate our model on 500 samples of this dataset against expert human judgments and demonstrate significant improvements over controlled baselines."
}