A Feasibility Study of Answer-Unaware Question Generation for Education

Abstract

We conduct a feasibility study into the applicability of answer-unaware question generation models to textbook passages. We show that a significant portion of errors in such systems arise from asking irrelevant or un-interpretable questions and that such errors can be ameliorated by providing summarized input. We find that giving these models human-written summaries instead of the original text results in a significant increase in acceptability of generated questions (33\% -> 83\%) as determined by expert annotators. We also find that, in the absence of human-written summaries, automatic summarization can serve as a good middle ground.

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