@inproceedings{yue-etal-2022-synthetic,
    title = "Synthetic Question Value Estimation for Domain Adaptation of Question Answering",
    author = "Yue, Xiang  and
      Yao, Ziyu  and
      Sun, Huan",
    editor = "Muresan, Smaranda  and
      Nakov, Preslav  and
      Villavicencio, Aline",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
    month = may,
    year = "2022",
    address = "Dublin, Ireland",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2022.acl-long.95/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2022.acl-long.95",
    pages = "1340--1351",
    abstract = "Synthesizing QA pairs with a question generator (QG) on the target domain has become a popular approach for domain adaptation of question answering (QA) models. Since synthetic questions are often noisy in practice, existing work adapts scores from a pretrained QA (or QG) model as criteria to select high-quality questions. However, these scores do not directly serve the ultimate goal of improving QA performance on the target domain. In this paper, we introduce a novel idea of training a question value estimator (QVE) that directly estimates the usefulness of synthetic questions for improving the target-domain QA performance. By conducting comprehensive experiments, we show that the synthetic questions selected by QVE can help achieve better target-domain QA performance, in comparison with existing techniques. We additionally show that by using such questions and only around 15{\%} of the human annotations on the target domain, we can achieve comparable performance to the fully-supervised baselines."
}