# PIE-QG: Paraphrased Information Extraction for Unsupervised Question Generation from Small Corpora

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.01064 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.01064/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 30 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Jan 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [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)
- [SQuAD: 100,000+ Questions for Machine Comprehension of Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05250/) (2016)
- [XLNet: Generalized Autoregressive Pretraining for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08237/) (2019)
- [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)
- [NewsQA: A Machine Comprehension Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.09830/) (2016)
- [MRQA 2019 Shared Task: Evaluating Generalization in Reading Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.09753/) (2019)
- [GECToR -- Grammatical Error Correction: Tag, Not Rewrite](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12592/) (2020)
- [DuoRC: Towards Complex Language Understanding with Paraphrased Reading Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.07927/) (2018)
- [Deep Reinforcement Learning for Mention-Ranking Coreference Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.08667/) (2016)
- [Unsupervised Question Answering by Cloze Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.04980/) (2019)
- [Template-Based Question Generation from Retrieved Sentences for Improved Unsupervised Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11892/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Multi-hop Question Answering by Question Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.12623/) (2020)
- [Answering Complex Questions Using Open Information Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.05572/) (2017)
- [Improving Unsupervised Question Answering via Summarization-Informed Question Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07954/) (2021)
- [Harvesting and Refining Question-Answer Pairs for Unsupervised QA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.02925/) (2020)

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

- [Leveraging Open Information Extraction for More Robust Domain Transfer of Event Trigger Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14163/) (2023)
- [InteractiveIE: Towards Assessing the Strength of Human-AI Collaboration in Improving the Performance of Information Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14659/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Supervised Question Answering systems (QA systems) rely on domain-specific human-labeled data for training. Unsupervised QA systems generate their own question-answer training pairs, typically using secondary knowledge sources to achieve this outcome. Our approach (called PIE-QG) uses Open Information Extraction (OpenIE) to generate synthetic training questions from paraphrased passages and uses the question-answer pairs as training data for a language model for a state-of-the-art QA system based on BERT. Triples in the form of <subject, predicate, object> are extracted from each passage, and questions are formed with subjects (or objects) and predicates while objects (or subjects) are considered as answers. Experimenting on five extractive QA datasets demonstrates that our technique achieves on-par performance with existing state-of-the-art QA systems with the benefit of being trained on an order of magnitude fewer documents and without any recourse to external reference data sources.