Guiding the Growth: Difficulty-Controllable Question Generation through Step-by-Step Rewriting

Yi Cheng, Siyao Li, Bang Liu, Ruihui Zhao, Sujian Li, Chenghua Lin, Yefeng Zheng


Abstract
This paper explores the task of Difficulty-Controllable Question Generation (DCQG), which aims at generating questions with required difficulty levels. Previous research on this task mainly defines the difficulty of a question as whether it can be correctly answered by a Question Answering (QA) system, lacking interpretability and controllability. In our work, we redefine question difficulty as the number of inference steps required to answer it and argue that Question Generation (QG) systems should have stronger control over the logic of generated questions. To this end, we propose a novel framework that progressively increases question difficulty through step-by-step rewriting under the guidance of an extracted reasoning chain. A dataset is automatically constructed to facilitate the research, on which extensive experiments are conducted to test the performance of our method.
Anthology ID:
2021.acl-long.465
Volume:
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Chengqing Zong, Fei Xia, Wenjie Li, Roberto Navigli
Venues:
ACL | IJCNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5968–5978
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.465
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.acl-long.465
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yi Cheng, Siyao Li, Bang Liu, Ruihui Zhao, Sujian Li, Chenghua Lin, and Yefeng Zheng. 2021. Guiding the Growth: Difficulty-Controllable Question Generation through Step-by-Step Rewriting. In Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 5968–5978, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Guiding the Growth: Difficulty-Controllable Question Generation through Step-by-Step Rewriting (Cheng et al., ACL-IJCNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-2023-videos/2021.acl-long.465.pdf
Video:
 https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-2023-videos/2021.acl-long.465.mp4
Data
HotpotQA