Semantic Templates for Generating Long-Form Technical Questions.

Question generation (QG) from technical text has multiple important applications such as creation of question-banks for examinations, interviews as well as in intelligent tutoring systems. However, much of the existing work for QG has focused on open-domain and not specifically on technical domain. We propose to generate technical questions using semantic templates. We also focus on ensuring that a large fraction of the generated questions are long-form, i.e., they require longer answers spanning multiple sentences. This is in contrast with existing work which has predominantly focused on generating factoid questions which have a few words or phrases as answers. Using the technical topics selected from undergraduate and graduate-level courses in Computer Science, we show that the proposed approach is able to generate questions with high acceptance rate. Further, we also show that the proposed template-based approach can be effectively leveraged using the distant supervision paradigm to finetune and significantly improve the existing sequence-to-sequence deep learning models for generating long-form, technical questions.