Machine Comprehension by Text-to-Text Neural Question Generation

  • ,
  • Tong Wang ,
  • Caglar Gulcehre ,
  • Alessandro Sordoni ,
  • Philip Bachman ,
  • Sandeep Subramanian ,
  • Saizheng Zhang ,
  • Adam Trischler

RepL4NLP workshop, ACL 2017 |

We propose a recurrent neural model that generates natural-language questions from documents, conditioned on answers. We show how to train the model using a combination of supervised and reinforcement learning. After teacher forcing for standard maximum likelihood training, we fine-tune the model using policy gradient techniques to maximize several rewards that measure question quality. Most notably, one of these rewards is the performance of a question-answering system. We motivate question generation as a means to improve the performance of question answering systems. Our model is trained and evaluated on the recent question-answering dataset SQuAD.