# Contrastive Multi-document Question Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.03047 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.03047/

## Key facts

- Cited by 15 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 8 Nov 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [BRIO: Bringing Order to Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16804/) (2022)
- [A Comparative Study of AI-Generated (GPT-4) and Human-crafted MCQs in Programming Education](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03173/) (2023)
- [MixQG: Neural Question Generation with Mixed Answer Types](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08175/) (2021)
- [Educational Question Generation of Children Storybooks via Question Type Distribution Learning and Event-Centric Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14187/) (2022)
- [Probing the Multi-turn Planning Capabilities of LLMs via 20 Question Games](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01468/) (2023)
- [RetGen: A Joint framework for Retrieval and Grounded Text Generation Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.06597/) (2021)
- [ISEEQ: Information Seeking Question Generation using Dynamic Meta-Information Retrieval and Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07622/) (2021)
- [QAScore -- An Unsupervised Unreferenced Metric for the Question Generation Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.04320/) (2022)
- [R2D2: Robust Data-to-Text with Replacement Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12467/) (2022)
- [Momentum Calibration for Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04257/) (2022)
- [Closed-book Question Generation via Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06781/) (2022)
- [The World According to LLMs: How Geographic Origin Influences LLMs' Entity Deduction Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.05525/) (2025)
- [Automatic Document Sketching: Generating Drafts from Analogous Texts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07192/) (2021)
- [Synthetic Context Generation for Question Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.13188/) (2024)
- [Learning to Diversify for Product Question Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.02534/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Multi-document question generation focuses on generating a question that covers the common aspect of multiple documents. Such a model is useful in generating clarifying options. However, a naive model trained only using the targeted ("positive") document set may generate too generic questions that cover a larger scope than delineated by the document set. To address this challenge, we introduce the contrastive learning strategy where given "positive" and "negative" sets of documents, we generate a question that is closely related to the "positive" set but is far away from the "negative" set. This setting allows generated questions to be more specific and related to the target document set. To generate such specific questions, we propose Multi-Source Coordinated Question Generator (MSCQG), a novel framework that includes a supervised learning (SL) stage and a reinforcement learning (RL) stage. In the SL stage, a single-document question generator is trained. In the RL stage, a coordinator model is trained to find optimal attention weights to align multiple single-document generators, by optimizing a reward designed to promote specificity of generated questions. We also develop an effective auxiliary objective, named Set-induced Contrastive Regularization (SCR) that improves the coordinator's contrastive learning during the RL stage. We show that our model significantly outperforms several strong baselines, as measured by automatic metrics and human evaluation. The source repository is publicly available at urlwww.github.com/woonsangcho/contrastqgen.