# QASnowball: An Iterative Bootstrapping Framework for High-Quality Question-Answering Data Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.10326 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.10326/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 22 of its 26 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Sep 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [SQuAD: 100,000+ Questions for Machine Comprehension of Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05250/) (2016)
- [Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04906/) (2020)
- [HotpotQA: A Dataset for Diverse, Explainable Multi-hop Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.09600/) (2018)
- [TriviaQA: A Large Scale Distantly Supervised Challenge Dataset for Reading Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.03551/) (2017)
- [LaMDA: Language Models for Dialog Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.08239/) (2022)
- [Reading Wikipedia to Answer Open-Domain Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00051/) (2017)
- [Document Expansion by Query Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08375/) (2019)
- [PAQ: 65 Million Probably-Asked Questions and What You Can Do With Them](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.07033/) (2021)
- [A Unified MRC Framework for Named Entity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.11476/) (2019)
- [Retrieving and Reading: A Comprehensive Survey on Open-domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00774/) (2021)
- [Synthetic QA Corpora Generation with Roundtrip Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05416/) (2019)
- [DuReader: a Chinese Machine Reading Comprehension Dataset from Real-world Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.05073/) (2017)
- [A Span-Extraction Dataset for Chinese Machine Reading Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.07366/) (2018)
- [DRCD: a Chinese Machine Reading Comprehension Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.00920/) (2018)
- [A Survey on Machine Reading Comprehension Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.01582/) (2020)
- [PERT: Pre-training BERT with Permuted Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.06906/) (2022)
- [Neural Snowball for Few-Shot Relation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.11007/) (2019)
- [Accelerating Real-Time Question Answering via Question Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.05167/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [QOG:Question and Options Generation based on Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12381/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent years have witnessed the success of question answering (QA), especially its potential to be a foundation paradigm for tackling diverse NLP tasks. However, obtaining sufficient data to build an effective and stable QA system still remains an open problem. For this problem, we introduce an iterative bootstrapping framework for QA data augmentation (named QASnowball), which can iteratively generate large-scale high-quality QA data based on a seed set of supervised examples. Specifically, QASnowball consists of three modules, an answer extractor to extract core phrases in unlabeled documents as candidate answers, a question generator to generate questions based on documents and candidate answers, and a QA data filter to filter out high-quality QA data. Moreover, QASnowball can be self-enhanced by reseeding the seed set to fine-tune itself in different iterations, leading to continual improvements in the generation quality. We conduct experiments in the high-resource English scenario and the medium-resource Chinese scenario, and the experimental results show that the data generated by QASnowball can facilitate QA models: (1) training models on the generated data achieves comparable results to using supervised data, and (2) pre-training on the generated data and fine-tuning on supervised data can achieve better performance. Our code and generated data will be released to advance further work.