Answer-guided and Semantic Coherent Question Generation in Open-domain Conversation

Weichao Wang, Shi Feng, Daling Wang, Yifei Zhang

Abstract
Generating intriguing question is a key step towards building human-like open-domain chatbots. Although some recent works have focused on this task, compared with questions raised by humans, significant gaps remain in maintaining semantic coherence with post, which may result in generating dull or deviated questions. We observe that the answer has strong semantic coherence to its question and post, which can be used to guide question generation. Thus, we devise two methods to further enhance semantic coherence between post and question under the guidance of answer. First, the coherence score between generated question and answer is used as the reward function in a reinforcement learning framework, to encourage the cases that are consistent with the answer in semantic. Second, we incorporate adversarial training to explicitly control question generation in the direction of question-answer coherence. Extensive experiments show that our two methods outperform state-of-the-art baseline algorithms with large margins in raising semantic coherent questions.
Anthology ID:
D19-1511
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2019
Address:
Hong Kong, China
Venues:
EMNLP | IJCNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5066–5076
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1511
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D19-1511
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Weichao Wang, Shi Feng, Daling Wang, and Yifei Zhang. 2019. Answer-guided and Semantic Coherent Question Generation in Open-domain Conversation. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP), pages 5066–5076, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Answer-guided and Semantic Coherent Question Generation in Open-domain Conversation (Wang et al., EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-script-update/D19-1511.pdf
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