# Using Implicit Feedback to Improve Question Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.13664 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.13664/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 76 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Apr 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.3781/) (2013)
- [SQuAD: 100,000+ Questions for Machine Comprehension of Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05250/) (2016)
- [Learning Phrase Representations using RNN Encoder-Decoder for Statistical Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.1078/) (2014)
- [Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.3215/) (2014)
- [Skip-Thought Vectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.06726/) (2015)
- [Learning to Ask: Neural Question Generation for Reading Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.00106/) (2017)
- [Neural Question Generation from Text: A Preliminary Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.01792/) (2017)
- [Relevance of Unsupervised Metrics in Task-Oriented Dialogue for Evaluating Natural Language Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.09799/) (2017)
- [Question Answering and Question Generation as Dual Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02027/) (2017)
- [Generating Factoid Questions With Recurrent Neural Networks: The 30M Factoid Question-Answer Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.06807/) (2016)
- [Machine Comprehension by Text-to-Text Neural Question Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.02012/) (2017)
- [MixQG: Neural Question Generation with Mixed Answer Types](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08175/) (2021)
- [Learning to Generate Questions by Learning What not to Generate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.10418/) (2019)
- [A Joint Model for Question Answering and Question Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.01450/) (2017)
- [Putting the Horse Before the Cart:A Generator-Evaluator Framework for Question Generation from Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.04961/) (2018)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Question Generation (QG) is a task of Natural Language Processing (NLP) that aims at automatically generating questions from text. Many applications can benefit from automatically generated questions, but often it is necessary to curate those questions, either by selecting or editing them. This task is informative on its own, but it is typically done post-generation, and, thus, the effort is wasted. In addition, most existing systems cannot incorporate this feedback back into them easily. In this work, we present a system, GEN, that learns from such (implicit) feedback. Following a pattern-based approach, it takes as input a small set of sentence/question pairs and creates patterns which are then applied to new unseen sentences. Each generated question, after being corrected by the user, is used as a new seed in the next iteration, so more patterns are created each time. We also take advantage of the corrections made by the user to score the patterns and therefore rank the generated questions. Results show that GEN is able to improve by learning from both levels of implicit feedback when compared to the version with no learning, considering the top 5, 10, and 20 questions. Improvements go up from 10%, depending on the metric and strategy used.