mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Guiding the Growth: Difficulty-Controllable Question Generation through Step-by-Step Rewriting

arXiv 2105.11698 ↗First posted 25 May 2021cs.CL cs.AIcited by 30

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Abstract (arXiv)

This paper explores the task of Difficulty-Controllable Question Generation (DCQG), which aims at generating questions with required difficulty levels. Previous research on this task mainly defines the difficulty of a question as whether it can be correctly answered by a Question Answering (QA) system, lacking interpretability and controllability. In our work, we redefine question difficulty as the number of inference steps required to answer it and argue that Question Generation (QG) systems should have stronger control over the logic of generated questions. To this end, we propose a novel framework that progressively increases question difficulty through step-by-step rewriting under the guidance of an extracted reasoning chain. A dataset is automatically constructed to facilitate the research, on which extensive experiments are conducted to test the performance of our method.

Key facts. Cited by 30 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 23 of its 37 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 25 May 2021.

Builds on

23 of 37 references.

References · 23

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11 more
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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2022: 8; 2023: 5; 2024: 6; 2025: 6; 2026: 5.

30 papers.

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  1. 2022Varifocal Question Generation for Fact-checkingcited by 27
  2. 2022Multiple-Choice Question Generation: Towards an Automated Assessment Frameworkcited by 23
  3. 2022Towards Process-Oriented, Modular, and Versatile Question Generation that Meets Educational Needscited by 19
  4. 2023FrameBERT: Conceptual Metaphor Detection with Frame Embedding Learningcited by 18
  5. 2022RQUGE: Reference-Free Metric for Evaluating Question Generation by Answering the Questioncited by 17
  6. 2024QGEval: Benchmarking Multi-dimensional Evaluation for Question Generationcited by 17
  7. 2022NGEP: A Graph-based Event Planning Framework for Story Generationcited by 13
  8. 2023Metaphor Detection with Effective Context Denoisingcited by 13
  9. 2022QRelScore: Better Evaluating Generated Questions with Deeper Understanding of Context-aware Relevancecited by 9
  10. 2025Writing-RL: Advancing Long-form Writing via Adaptive Curriculum Reinforcement Learningcited by 9
  11. 2024Explainable Multi-hop Question Generation: An End-to-End Approach without Intermediate Question Labelingcited by 7
  12. 2023Diversity Enhanced Narrative Question Generation for Storybookscited by 5
18 more
  1. 2022Event Transition Planning for Open-ended Text Generationcited by 4
  2. 2024Synthetic Context Generation for Question Generationcited by 4
  3. 2026KNIGHT: Knowledge Graph-Driven Multiple-Choice Question Generation with Adaptive Hardness Calibrationcited by 4
  4. 2022Feeding What You Need by Understanding What You Learnedcited by 3
  5. 2024Survey of Natural Language Processing for Education: Taxonomy, Systematic Review, and Future Trendscited by 3
  6. 2025AutoJudger: An Agent-Driven Framework for Efficient Benchmarking of MLLMscited by 3
  7. 2024Increasing the Difficulty of Automatically Generated Questions via Reinforcement Learning with Synthetic Preferencecited by 2
  8. 2024ECIS-VQG: Generation of Entity-centric Information-seeking Questions from Videoscited by 2
  9. 2025HopWeaver: Cross-Document Synthesis of High-Quality and Authentic Multi-Hop Questionscited by 2
  10. 2023SkillQG: Learning to Generate Question for Reading Comprehension Assessmentcited by 1
  11. 2025Advancing Question Generation with Joint Narrative and Difficulty Controlcited by 1
  12. 2025Difficulty-Controllable Multiple-Choice Question Generation Using Large Language Models and Direct Preference Optimizationcited by 1
  13. 2026IRB: Automated Generation of Robust Factuality Benchmarkscited by 1
  14. 2023Contrastive Learning for Inference in Dialoguecited by 0
  15. 2025From Model to Classroom: Evaluating Generated MCQs for Portuguese with Narrative and Difficulty Concernscited by 0
  16. 2026Generating Multiple-Choice Knowledge Questions with Interpretable Difficulty Estimation using Knowledge Graphs and Large Language Modelscited by 0
  17. 2026MUSE: Benchmarking Large Vision-Language Models on Multi-Modal Understanding in Situated Educationcited by 0
  18. 2026ChemCLIR-Bench: Benchmarking Cross-Lingual Information Retrieval in Multilingual Chemical Patentscited by 0