Diversify Question Generation with Retrieval-Augmented Style Transfer

Published: 07 Oct 2023, Last Modified: 01 Dec 2023EMNLP 2023 MainEveryoneRevisionsBibTeX
Submission Type: Regular Long Paper
Submission Track: Question Answering
Submission Track 2: Natural Language Generation
Keywords: Question Generation; Retrieval Augmented Generation;Style Transfer
TL;DR: RAST: a Retrieval-Augmented Style Transfer framework for QG that maximizes diversity and consistency via novel RL, outperforming strong baselines.
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 \url{https://github.com/gouqi666/RAST}.
Submission Number: 3426
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