# Generating Answer Candidates for Quizzes and Answer-Aware Question Generators

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.12898 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.12898/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 38 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Aug 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [Think you have Solved Question Answering? Try ARC, the AI2 Reasoning Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.05457/) (2018)
- [SQuAD: 100,000+ Questions for Machine Comprehension of Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05250/) (2016)
- [ALBERT: A Lite BERT for Self-supervised Learning of Language Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11942/) (2019)
- [Can a Suit of Armor Conduct Electricity? A New Dataset for Open Book Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02789/) (2018)
- [Know What You Don't Know: Unanswerable Questions for SQuAD](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.03822/) (2018)
- [PEGASUS: Pre-training with Extracted Gap-sentences for Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.08777/) (2019)
- [Crowdsourcing Multiple Choice Science Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06209/) (2017)
- [Unified Language Model Pre-training for Natural Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.03197/) (2019)
- [NewsQA: A Machine Comprehension Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.09830/) (2016)
- [SearchQA: A New Q&A Dataset Augmented with Context from a Search Engine](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.05179/) (2017)
- [ProphetNet: Predicting Future N-gram for Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.04063/) (2020)
- [UniLMv2: Pseudo-Masked Language Models for Unified Language Model Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.12804/) (2020)
- [Learning to Ask: Neural Question Generation for Reading Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.00106/) (2017)
- [QA Dataset Explosion: A Taxonomy of NLP Resources for Question Answering and Reading Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.12708/) (2021)
- [Neural Question Generation from Text: A Preliminary Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.01792/) (2017)
- [EXAMS: A Multi-Subject High School Examinations Dataset for Cross-Lingual and Multilingual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.03080/) (2020)
- [Harvesting Paragraph-Level Question-Answer Pairs from Wikipedia](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.05942/) (2018)
- [ERNIE-GEN: An Enhanced Multi-Flow Pre-training and Fine-tuning Framework for Natural Language Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.11314/) (2020)
- [A Survey on Machine Reading Comprehension: Tasks, Evaluation Metrics and Benchmark Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11880/) (2020)
- [English Machine Reading Comprehension Datasets: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.10421/) (2021)
- [Quiz-Style Question Generation for News Stories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09094/) (2021)
- [Beyond English-Only Reading Comprehension: Experiments in Zero-Shot Multilingual Transfer for Bulgarian](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.01519/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Leaf: Multiple-Choice Question Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.09012/) (2022)
- [ELQA: A Corpus of Metalinguistic Questions and Answers about English](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.00395/) (2022)
- [GenQ: Automated Question Generation to Support Caregivers While Reading Stories with Children](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16809/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In education, open-ended quiz questions have become an important tool for assessing the knowledge of students. Yet, manually preparing such questions is a tedious task, and thus automatic question generation has been proposed as a possible alternative. So far, the vast majority of research has focused on generating the question text, relying on question answering datasets with readily picked answers, and the problem of how to come up with answer candidates in the first place has been largely ignored. Here, we aim to bridge this gap. In particular, we propose a model that can generate a specified number of answer candidates for a given passage of text, which can then be used by instructors to write questions manually or can be passed as an input to automatic answer-aware question generators. Our experiments show that our proposed answer candidate generation model outperforms several baselines.