English

Meta Sequence Learning for Generating Adequate Question-Answer Pairs

Computation and Language 2021-10-01 v2

Abstract

Creating multiple-choice questions to assess reading comprehension of a given article involves generating question-answer pairs (QAPs) on the main points of the document. We present a learning scheme to generate adequate QAPs via meta-sequence representations of sentences. A meta sequence is a sequence of vectors comprising semantic and syntactic tags. In particular, we devise a scheme called MetaQA to learn meta sequences from training data to form pairs of a meta sequence for a declarative sentence (MD) and a corresponding interrogative sentence (MIs). On a given declarative sentence, a trained MetaQA model converts it to a meta sequence, finds a matched MD, and uses the corresponding MIs and the input sentence to generate QAPs. We implement MetaQA for the English language using semantic-role labeling, part-of-speech tagging, and named-entity recognition, and show that trained on a small dataset, MetaQA generates efficiently over the official SAT practice reading tests a large number of syntactically and semantically correct QAPs with over 97\% accuracy.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2010.01620,
  title  = {Meta Sequence Learning for Generating Adequate Question-Answer Pairs},
  author = {Cheng Zhang and Jie Wang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2010.01620},
  year   = {2021}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T19:01:05.878Z