English

ChainCQG: Flow-Aware Conversational Question Generation

Artificial Intelligence 2021-02-08 v1

Abstract

Conversational systems enable numerous valuable applications, and question-answering is an important component underlying many of these. However, conversational question-answering remains challenging due to the lack of realistic, domain-specific training data. Inspired by this bottleneck, we focus on conversational question generation as a means to generate synthetic conversations for training and evaluation purposes. We present a number of novel strategies to improve conversational flow and accommodate varying question types and overall fluidity. Specifically, we design ChainCQG as a two-stage architecture that learns question-answer representations across multiple dialogue turns using a flow propagation training strategy.ChainCQG significantly outperforms both answer-aware and answer-unaware SOTA baselines (e.g., up to 48% BLEU-1 improvement). Additionally, our model is able to generate different types of questions, with improved fluidity and coreference alignment.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2102.02864,
  title  = {ChainCQG: Flow-Aware Conversational Question Generation},
  author = {Jing Gu and Mostafa Mirshekari and Zhou Yu and Aaron Sisto},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2102.02864},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

EACL 2021

R2 v1 2026-06-23T22:51:13.270Z