Cited by 696Topic ModelingNatural Language Processing TechniquesMultimodal Machine Learning Applications

Learning to Ask: Neural Question Generation for Reading Comprehension

Open access
Du, Xinya, Shao, Junru, Cardie, Claire·2017·Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Abstract

We study automatic question generation for sentences from text passages in reading comprehension.We introduce an attention-based sequence learning model for the task and investigate the effect of encoding sentence-vs.paragraph-level information.In contrast to all previous work, our model does not rely on hand-crafted rules or a sophisticated NLP pipeline; it is instead trainable end-to-end via sequenceto-sequence learning.Automatic evaluation results show that our system significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art rule-based system.In human evaluations, questions generated by our system are also rated as being more natural (i.e., grammaticality, fluency) and as more difficult to answer (in terms of syntactic and lexical divergence from the original text and reasoning needed to answer).

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.18653/v1/p17-1123

Cites

41 of 41 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • The model of [35] outperformed the baseline from [32] in both automatic and human evaluations.

    “The authors performed both automatic evaluations using BLEU, METEOR, and ROUGE as well as human-based evaluation and found that their model outperformed the baseline model in [32] that they considered.”
  • Other human evaluation approaches use naturalness and difficulty.

    “Other approaches make use of naturalness [32, 35] and difficulty [35].”
  • Generated questions lack semantics and relevance to some extent, as reported in most studies through human evaluation.

    “However, the questions generated lack to a certain extent in terms of semantics and relevance as reported in most studies through human evaluation [32, 35, 36, 39, 56, 61].”
  • Recent approaches have applied ML techniques such as multi-armed bandit techniques to adaptively personalize sequences of learning activities, LSTMs to generate questions to evaluate language comprehension, and RL to improve the strategies used within the ITS.

    “While ITSs have traditionally been defined and constructed by hand, recent approaches have applied ML techniques such as multi-armed bandit techniques to adaptively personalize sequences of learning activities [135], LSTMs to generate questions to evaluate language comprehension [205], and RL to improve the strategies used within the ITS [365,441].”

    From Tackling climate change with machine learning (2023) · cites this paper as [205]

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

1 of the 42 references couldn’t be matched to a known paper.

Research works printed but not linked: 2

  1. Thang Luong, Hieu Pham, and Christopher D. Manning. 2015a. Effective approaches to attentionbased neural machine translation. In Proceedings of the 2015 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing . Association for Computational Linguistics, Lisbon, Portugal, pages 14121421. http://aclweb.org/anthology/D15-1166.
  2. Ruslan Mitkov and Le An Ha. 2003. Computeraided generation of multiple-choice tests. In Jill Burstein and Claudia Leacock, editors, Proceedings of the HLT-NAACL 03 Workshop on Building Educational Applications Using Natural Language Processing . pages 17-22. http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W03-0203.pdf.

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Authors
Du, X., Shao, J., & Cardie, C.
Affiliations
  • Cornell University (US)
  • Shanghai Jiao Tong University (CN)
Corresponding author
Cardie, Claire
Venue
Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Published
2017
Pages
1342-1352
ISSN
0736-587X (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W2962717047
Cited by
696
References
42
Citations by year
2026: 25 · 2025: 36 · 2024: 54 · 2023: 95 · 2022: 101 · 2021: 120 · 2020: 111 · 2019: 90 · 2018: 56 · 2017: 8
FWCI
33.06
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
Licence
cc-by
Locations
  • Proceedings of the conference - Association for Computational Linguistics. Meeting (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University)
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Topic Modeling
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Natural Language Processing Techniques
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Multimodal Machine Learning Applications
Keywords
automatic question generation, reading comprehension, end-to-end learning, question difficulty

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review