English

Question Generation by Transformers

Computation and Language 2019-09-17 v2 Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning

Abstract

A machine learning model was developed to automatically generate questions from Wikipedia passages using transformers, an attention-based model eschewing the paradigm of existing recurrent neural networks (RNNs). The model was trained on the inverted Stanford Question Answering Dataset (SQuAD), which is a reading comprehension dataset consisting of 100,000+ questions posed by crowdworkers on a set of Wikipedia articles. After training, the question generation model is able to generate simple questions relevant to unseen passages and answers containing an average of 8 words per question. The word error rate (WER) was used as a metric to compare the similarity between SQuAD questions and the model-generated questions. Although the high average WER suggests that the questions generated differ from the original SQuAD questions, the questions generated are mostly grammatically correct and plausible in their own right.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1909.05017,
  title  = {Question Generation by Transformers},
  author = {Kettip Kriangchaivech and Artit Wangperawong},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1909.05017},
  year   = {2019}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T11:12:13.996Z