Diversify Question Generation with Retrieval-Augmented Style Transfer

Qi Gou, Zehua Xia, Bowen Yu, Haiyang Yu, Fei Huang, Yongbin Li, Nguyen Cam-Tu


Abstract
Given a textual passage and an answer, humans are able to ask questions with various expressions, but this ability is still challenging for most question generation (QG) systems. Existing solutions mainly focus on the internal knowledge within the given passage or the semantic word space for diverse content planning. These methods, however, have not considered the potential of external knowledge for expression diversity. To bridge this gap, we propose RAST, a framework for Retrieval-Augmented Style Transfer, where the objective is to utilize the style of diverse templates for question generation. For training RAST, we develop a novel Reinforcement Learning (RL) based approach that maximizes a weighted combination of diversity reward and consistency reward. Here, the consistency reward is computed by a Question-Answering (QA) model, whereas the diversity reward measures how much the final output mimics the retrieved template. Experimental results show that our method outperforms previous diversity-driven baselines on diversity while being comparable in terms of consistency scores. Our code is available at https://github.com/gouqi666/RAST.
Anthology ID:
2023.emnlp-main.104
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1677–1690
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.104
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.104
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Qi Gou, Zehua Xia, Bowen Yu, Haiyang Yu, Fei Huang, Yongbin Li, and Nguyen Cam-Tu. 2023. Diversify Question Generation with Retrieval-Augmented Style Transfer. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 1677–1690, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Diversify Question Generation with Retrieval-Augmented Style Transfer (Gou et al., EMNLP 2023)
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