# Generating Followup Questions for Interpretable Multi-hop Question Answering

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.12344 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.12344/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 27 Feb 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [FOLLOWUPQG: Towards Information-Seeking Follow-up Question Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.05007/) (2023)
- [Unleashing Multi-Hop Reasoning Potential in Large Language Models through Repetition of Misordered Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.07103/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We propose a framework for answering open domain multi-hop questions in which partial information is read and used to generate followup questions, to finally be answered by a pretrained single-hop answer extractor. This framework makes each hop interpretable, and makes the retrieval associated with later hops as flexible and specific as for the first hop. As a first instantiation of this framework, we train a pointer-generator network to predict followup questions based on the question and partial information. This provides a novel application of a neural question generation network, which is applied to give weak ground truth single-hop followup questions based on the final answers and their supporting facts. Learning to generate followup questions that select the relevant answer spans against downstream supporting facts, while avoiding distracting premises, poses an exciting semantic challenge for text generation. We present an evaluation using the two-hop bridge questions of HotpotQA.