Automatic question generation : a syntactical approach to the sentence-to-question generation case

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Date
2012
Authors
Ali, Husam Deeb Abdullah Deeb
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Lethbridge, Alta. : University of Lethbridge, Dept. of Mathematics and Computer Science, c2012
Abstract
Humans are not often very skilled in asking good questions because of their inconsistent mind in certain situations. Thus, Question Generation (QG) and Question Answering (QA) became the two major challenges for the Natural Language Processing (NLP), Natural Language Generation (NLG), Intelligent Tutoring System, and Information Retrieval (IR) communities, recently. In this thesis, we consider a form of Sentence-to-Question generation task where given a sentence as input, the QG system would generate a set of questions for which the sentence contains, implies, or needs answers. Since the given sentence may be a complex sentence, our system generates elementary sentences from the input complex sentences using a syntactic parser. A Part of Speech (POS) tagger and a Named Entity Recognizer (NER) are used to encode necessary information. Based on the subject, verb, object and preposition information, sentences are classified in order to determine the type of questions to be generated. We conduct extensive experiments on the TREC-2007 (Question Answering Track) dataset. The scenario for the main task in the TREC-2007 QA track was that an adult, native speaker of English is looking for information about a target of interest. Using the given target, we filter out the important sentences from the large sentence pool and generate possible questions from them. Once we generate all the questions from the sentences, we perform a recall-based evaluation. That is, we count the overlap of our system generated questions with the given questions in the TREC dataset. For a topic, we get a recall 1.0 if all the given TREC questions are generated by our QG system and 0.0 if opposite. To validate the performance of our QG system, we took part in the First Question Generation Shared Task Evaluation Challenge, QGSTEC in 2010. Experimental analysis and evaluation results along with a comparison of different participants of QGSTEC'2010 show potential significance of our QG system.
Description
x, 125 leaves : ill. ; 29 cm
Keywords
Question-answering systems , Natural language processing (Computer science)
Citation