What Is a Good Question? Assessing Question Quality via Meta-Fact Checking

Bo Zhang, Jianghua Zhu, Chaozhuo Li, Hao Yu, Li Kong, Zhan Wang, Dezhuang Miao, Xiaoming Zhang, Junsheng Zhou

Abstract: Knowledge-based questions are typically employed to evaluate LLM's knowledge boundaries; meanwhile, numerous studies focus on question generation as a means to enhance the capabilities of both models and individuals. However, there is a lack of in-depth exploration about what constitutes a good question from the perspective of knowledge cognition. This paper proposes aligning the complete knowledge underlying questions with educational criteria effectively employed in physics courses, thereby developing novel knowledge-intensive metrics of question quality. To this end, we propose Meta-Fact Checking (MFC), which transforms questions into knowledge graph (KG) triples utilizing LLMs through few-shot prompting, thereby quantifying question quality based on the patterns observed within these triples. MFC introduces a novel interaction mechanism for KGs that communicates meta-facts, illustrating the types of knowledge that KGs can offer to the LLM for reasoning questions, rather than relying solely on the original triples. This strategy ensures that MFC remains unaffected by unexplored triples that LLM has not yet encountered within KGs compared to the retrieve-while-reasoning routine. Experiments across multiple datasets and LLMs demonstrate that MFC significantly improves the accuracy and efficiency of both question answering and assessing. This research marks a pioneering effort to automate the evaluation of question quality based on cognitive capabilities.