Comparison Question Generation Based on Potential Compared Attributes Extraction

Question generation (QG) aims to automatically generate questions from a given passage, which is widely used in education. Existing studies on the QG task mainly focus on the answer-aware QG, which only asks an independent object related to the expected answer. However, to prompt students to develop comparative thinking skills, multiple objects need to be simultaneously focused on the QG task, which can be used to attract students to explore the differences and similarities between them. Towards this end, we consider a new task named comparison question generation (CQG). In this paper, we propose a framework that includes an attribute extractor and an attribute-attention seq2seq module. Specially, the attribute extractor is based on Stanford CoreNLP Toolkit to recognize the attributes related to the multiple objects that can be used for comparison. Then, the attribute-attention seq2seq module utilizes an attention mechanism to generate questions with the assistance of the attributes. Extensive experiments conducted on the HotpotQA dataset manifest the effectiveness of our framework, which outperforms the neural-based model and generates reliable comparison questions.