Educational Question Generation of Children Storybooks via Question Type Distribution Learning and Event-centric Summarization
Zhenjie Zhao, Yufang Hou, Dakuo Wang, Mo Yu, Chengzhong Liu, Xiaojuan Ma
Abstract
Generating educational questions of fairytales or storybooks is vital for improving children’s literacy ability. However, it is challenging to generate questions that capture the interesting aspects of a fairytale story with educational meaningfulness. In this paper, we propose a novel question generation method that first learns the question type distribution of an input story paragraph, and then summarizes salient events which can be used to generate high-cognitive-demand questions. To train the event-centric summarizer, we finetune a pre-trained transformer-based sequence-to-sequence model using silver samples composed by educational question-answer pairs. On a newly proposed educational question-answering dataset FairytaleQA, we show good performance of our method on both automatic and human evaluation metrics. Our work indicates the necessity of decomposing question type distribution learning and event-centric summary generation for educational question generation.- Anthology ID:
- 2022.acl-long.348
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
- Month:
- May
- Year:
- 2022
- Address:
- Dublin, Ireland
- Editors:
- Smaranda Muresan, Preslav Nakov, Aline Villavicencio
- Venue:
- ACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 5073–5085
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-long.348
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2022.acl-long.348
- Cite (ACL):
- Zhenjie Zhao, Yufang Hou, Dakuo Wang, Mo Yu, Chengzhong Liu, and Xiaojuan Ma. 2022. Educational Question Generation of Children Storybooks via Question Type Distribution Learning and Event-centric Summarization. In Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 5073–5085, Dublin, Ireland. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Educational Question Generation of Children Storybooks via Question Type Distribution Learning and Event-centric Summarization (Zhao et al., ACL 2022)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/emnlp-22-attachments/2022.acl-long.348.pdf
- Code
- zhaozj89/Educational-Question-Generation
- Data
- FairytaleQA