@inproceedings{ashok-kumar-etal-2023-improving,
    title = "Improving Reading Comprehension Question Generation with Data Augmentation and Overgenerate-and-rank",
    author = "Ashok Kumar, Nischal  and
      Fernandez, Nigel  and
      Wang, Zichao  and
      Lan, Andrew",
    editor = {Kochmar, Ekaterina  and
      Burstein, Jill  and
      Horbach, Andrea  and
      Laarmann-Quante, Ronja  and
      Madnani, Nitin  and
      Tack, Ana{\"\i}s  and
      Yaneva, Victoria  and
      Yuan, Zheng  and
      Zesch, Torsten},
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 18th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA 2023)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2023",
    address = "Toronto, Canada",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2023.bea-1.22",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2023.bea-1.22",
    pages = "247--259",
    abstract = "Reading comprehension is a crucial skill in many aspects of education, including language learning, cognitive development, and fostering early literacy skills in children. Automated answer-aware reading comprehension question generation has significant potential to scale up learner support in educational activities. One key technical challenge in this setting is that there can be multiple questions, sometimes very different from each other, with the same answer; a trained question generation method may not necessarily know which question human educators would prefer. To address this challenge, we propose 1) a data augmentation method that enriches the training dataset with diverse questions given the same context and answer and 2) an overgenerate-and-rank method to select the best question from a pool of candidates. We evaluate our method on the FairytaleQA dataset, showing a 5{\%} absolute improvement in ROUGE-L over the best existing method. We also demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in generating harder, {``}implicit{''} questions, where the answers are not contained in the context as text spans.",
}

Reading comprehension is a crucial skill in many aspects of education, including language learning, cognitive development, and fostering early literacy skills in children. Automated answer-aware reading comprehension question generation has significant potential to scale up learner support in educational activities. One key technical challenge in this setting is that there can be multiple questions, sometimes very different from each other, with the same answer; a trained question generation method may not necessarily know which question human educators would prefer. To address this challenge, we propose 1) a data augmentation method that enriches the training dataset with diverse questions given the same context and answer and 2) an overgenerate-and-rank method to select the best question from a pool of candidates. We evaluate our method on the FairytaleQA dataset, showing a 5{\%} absolute improvement in ROUGE-L over the best existing method. We also demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in generating harder, {``}implicit{''} questions, where the answers are not contained in the context as text spans.
Ashok Kumar, Nischal Fern ez, Nigel Wang, Zichao Lan, Andrew
Improving Reading Comprehension Question Generation with Data Augmentation and Overgenerate-and-rank