Abstract
An automatic question generation (QG) system aims to produce questions from a text, such as a sentence or a paragraph. Traditional approaches are mainly based on heuristic, hand-crafted rules to transduce a declarative sentence to a related interrogative sentence. However, creating such a set of rules requires deep linguistic knowledge and most of these rules are language-specific. Although a data-driven approach reduces the participation of linguistic experts, to get sufficient labeled data for QG model training is still a difficult task. In this paper, we applied a neural sequence-to-sequence pointer-generator network with various transfer learning strategies to capture the underlying information of making a question, on a target domain with rare training pairs. Our experiment demonstrates the viability of domain adaptation in QG task. We also show the possibility that transfer learning is helpful in a semi-supervised approach when the amount of training pairs in the target QG dataset is not large enough.
This research is partially supported by the “Aim for the Top University Project” of National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU), sponsored by the Ministry of Education and Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan, R.O.C. under Grant no. MOST 108-2221-E-003-010.
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Liao, YH., Koh, JL. (2020). Question Generation Through Transfer Learning. In: Fujita, H., Fournier-Viger, P., Ali, M., Sasaki, J. (eds) Trends in Artificial Intelligence Theory and Applications. Artificial Intelligence Practices. IEA/AIE 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12144. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55789-8_1
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