Abstract
Generating some appealing questions in open-domain conversations is an effective way to improve human-machine interactions and lead the topic to a broader or deeper direction. To avoid dull or deviated questions, some researchers tried to utilize answer, the “future” information, to guide question generation. However, they separate a post-question-answer (PQA) triple into two parts: post-question (PQ) and question-answer (QA) pairs, which may hurt the overall coherence. Besides, the QA relationship is modeled as a one-to-one mapping that is not reasonable in open-domain conversations. To tackle these problems, we propose a generative triple-wise model with hierarchical variations for open-domain conversational question generation (CQG). Latent variables in three hierarchies are used to represent the shared background of a triple and one-to-many semantic mappings in both PQ and QA pairs. Experimental results on a large-scale CQG dataset show that our method significantly improves the quality of questions in terms of fluency, coherence and diversity over competitive baselines.- Anthology ID:
- 2021.acl-long.271
- 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:
- 3495–3506
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.271
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2021.acl-long.271
- Cite (ACL):
- Lei Shen, Fandong Meng, Jinchao Zhang, Yang Feng, and Jie Zhou. 2021. GTM: A Generative Triple-wise Model for Conversational Question Generation. 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 3495–3506, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- GTM: A Generative Triple-wise Model for Conversational Question Generation (Shen et al., ACL-IJCNLP 2021)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/proper-vol2-ingestion/2021.acl-long.271.pdf